NAIRAMETRICS:
The Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, has said that the Ministry in its bid to make Nigeria a global leader in Artificial Intelligence, has identified over 6,000 AI researchers who are of Nigerian descent and based in several parts of the world.
The Minister had earlier in August, via a post on Twitter, asked Nigerians to recommend any AI researchers of Nigerian descent to join the country in co-creating a National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy.
How they were found
Explaining how the Ministry was able to identify the over 6,000 Nigerian AI researchers spread all over the globe, the Minister said:
- “Since I’ve been in office, we’ve prioritized artificial intelligence and the first thing we did was to understand that we’ve not invested significantly in AI before. But we know for certain that there’s absolutely no top academic institution in the world where you don’t have a Nigerian so we give AI the assignments to help us find them. We downloaded all the academic publications on artificial intelligence in the world, of them.
- “Then we use a library for Nigerian names to train the machine and say, sift through these thousands of publications and find names that look like Nigerian names. And were able to find over 6000 world-class researchers of Nigerian descent working in artificial intelligence.
- “So, this has been the foundation for what we’re building, where we’re now reimagining the artificial intelligence strategy for Nigeria. We’re having clarity in terms of how this technology is going to help Nigeria to do better, but also how we have to protect Nigeria from the vices of AI. So that’s the first thing with it.”
