artificial intelligence - The African Mirror

Jan

30

2021

‘By Africans, for Africans’: Female entrepreneur pioneers facial recognition tech

KIM HARRISBERG CHARLETTE N'Guessan Desiree loved maths and science as a student in Ivory Coast but never imagined she would one day use her problem-solving savvy to develop facial recognition technology more adept at identifying and verifying African faces. Her company, BACE Group, hopes its artificial intelligence (AI) software will be used across the continent - helping universities to verify students for financial services, banks to sign up new clients and security firms to fight crime. N'Guessan Desiree, 27, said there would be less suspicion of tech created "by Africans, for Africans", especially given concerns that Western-designed systems are more…

Dec

04

2020

By The African Mirror

‘I know your favourite drink’: Chinese smart city to put AI in charge

AFRICITIES

UMBERTO BACCHI FROM robots delivering coffee to office chairs rearranging themselves after a meeting, a smart city project in China aims to put artificial intelligence in charge, its creators told a conference this week - raising some eyebrows. Danish architecture firm BIG and Chinese tech company Terminus discussed plans to build an AI-run campus-style development in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing during an online panel at Web Summit, a global tech conference. The project named Cloud Valley, plans to use sensors and wifi-connected devices to gather data on everything from weather and pollution to people's eating habits to automatically…

Sep

22

2020

By The African Mirror

Questions swirl about possible racial bias in Twitter image function

SCIENCE, TECH AND INNOVATION

AVI ASHER-SCHAPIRO SOCIAL media giant Twitter said on Monday it would investigate its image-cropping function that users complained favored white faces over black. The image preview function of Twitter's mobile app automatically crops pictures that are too big to fit on the screen and selects which parts of the image to display and cut off. Prompted by a graduate student who found an image he was posting cropped out the face of a Black colleague, a San Francisco-based programmer found Twitter's system would crop out images of President Barack Obama when posted alongside Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. "Twitter is…

Sep

16

2020

By The African Mirror

New website by Senegalese AI expert spotlights Africans in STEM

SCIENCE, TECH AND INNOVATION

GROWING up in a trading town in Senegal, Adji Bousso Dieng loved school and had a particular talent for maths. But with a dearth of career role models, she had no idea which path to follow. Some two decades later and a research scientist working on artificial intelligence at Google, Dieng wants to give young Africans the inspiring examples she missed out on. "I didn't have a career role model to look up to and say, 'oh I want to be this'," said Dieng, who recently earned a PhD in statistics and will next year become the first Black female…