Name: How Innovative Technology Can Transform a Continent
Uploaded: 2019-07-17
Duration: 5 min 56 s
Description: Omoju Miller, Machine Learning Engineer at GitHub, discusses how radical technology innovation can transform a continent such as Africa.

Today I want to talk to you about AI at the frontier. And before I do that, there's a little clarification I want to make. When I talk about artificial intelligence, what I'm actually talking about is a blend of computer science and statistics at the aid of humanity. We use this information to build planetary scale, Inference and decision making systems. I'm sure many of you have heard about the Africa rising narrative that has been going around for a couple of years past decade. I was originally born in Nigeria and I'm a Nigerian living in San Francisco. From the IMF, we know that most of the world's emerging economies fastest growing economies are going to be coming from Sub Saharan Africa. 60 % of its 1. 2 billion population is under the age of 25. At the end of the decade, Africa will have 90 cities with a population of at least a million. By contrast, the United States has 10 of those cities. This statistic is one of the most interesting to me It is the home of half of all global mobile payment users. That's one hundred and twenty million different people using mobile payments. When I talk about machine learning at the frontier I am not talking about the frontiers of the machine knowing knowledge itself. Instead, I'm talking about deploying this planetary scale, inference, and decision- making systems in a frontiers environment. When you think of a frontier, what I usually think about is the American West before the Pacific settlements. That environment necessitates a kind of innovation to make life work. America innovated so many different things that eventually led to the creation of Silicon Valley. We are at the edge of another kind of technology frontier. This time around. It's not in San Francisco, it is happening in Africa. There are the same conditions that necessitate a different kind of technology innovation. One of the most interesting thing about this planetary skill, inference and decision- making systems, is that you don't even understand their power until you travel. So last summer, I went on vacation with my family to Kenya. We arrived at the airport. And immediately at the airport, we went a few doors down to Safaricom, and I got data access on my phone. I didn't think anything of it. I'm just getting data. I went to my phone and looked at the app and I was very very surprised that I was being offered some limited amount of financial services immediately. The system had decided that there was enough data about me to be able to offer me this kind of services. I was rather intrigued, I took my phone, called Uber, Uber took me to where I was going. Used for delivery services like [ UNKNOWN ] to get you to the house. And I did basically the same technology habits, technology [ UNKNOWN ] that's I'm used to in San Francisco and Nairobi. What struck me though was we then went to [ UNKNOWN ] Which is on the border of Tanzania. And to get there, we drove to all the small differences, towns and villages. And the interesting thing about doing that drive was really seeing how far deep technology had fully penetrated. We're talking about very small villages, and yet in those small villages You can still use mobile payments, I realised then and then that this transformation is going to radically change what the continent looks like. One of the interesting things that has emerged in that kind of technology wilderness is for example what do you do where they are either no roads or their bad roads? One of the solutions is you can take to the air. There is a company out of San Francisco called Zipline. They have created a very innovative logistics solutions. What they do is use drones to deliver blood to rural Africa. These are villages that can't get load fast enough because the roads are bad. And so you can just use a drone to drop the package and the life of a person is saved. These are the kinds of radical technology innovation based mostly on data and have a little bit of data as well as machine learning that we're seeing created in the African environment. I want to end with an interesting data story. Last last month I went to lead us with get up CEO Nick Friedman, and his chief of staff at [ UNKNOWN ]. We went to Lagos because based on our October 1 report, which is our annual report of the behaviors of developers in our platform, we realized that Nigeria was one of the countries with the fastest growing rate of developers contributing to open source So we went down there to actually see what the developers were up to. And we use data to inform us on what we should do. We decided we were going to have an open source mixer. We went through our data, and we invited the top 50 contributors to come to our event. The event was an amazing event. What was interesting about that event is every single person in that room earn their way to their work. It didn't matter who they were, where they were born, whether they were born into affluence, whether were born into poverty, or what their ethnicity was. All that matters is their work. And it struck me even I, a person that believes in data driven approaches, mitigating the impact of bias, I had never really seen how powerful it was. We brought all these people together, many of them who never even knew each other. Building the software that many of us rely upon, and we created a community for them through our data. This data is so powerful, it's the power of all of us through one of us, each of us, thank you. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

How Innovative Technology Can Transform a Continent 

Tech

Omoju Miller, Machine Learning Engineer at GitHub, discusses how radical technology innovation can transform a continent such as Africa. 