Search engine giant is set to launch its latest AI research center in Accra, Ghana sometime later this year. The center will see world-class marching learning researchers and engineers stream into Ghana for research purposed.
“Today, we’re announcing a Google AI research center in Africa, which will open later this year in Accra, Ghana. We’ll bring together top machine learning researchers and engineers in this new center dedicated to AI research and its applications,” said Google in a statement.
“We’re committed to collaborating with local universities and research centers, as well as working with policymakers on the potential uses of AI in Africa.”
The two researchers in charge of the center, Jeff Dean, a Senior Fellow Google AI and Moustapha Cisses, a Staff Research Scientist and lead of Google AI Center in Accra, will work together while combining their experiences in Africa to boost the adoption of AI technology in addressing the various socio-economic challenges facing the continent.
The research center’s activities will be geared towards coming up with innovative solutions to challenges being faced in the agriculture, healthcare, and education centers.
When up and running, the AI research center in Ghana will place Accra on the global maps of AI research alongside cities like Paris, Tokyo, Seattle, New York, Boston, Tel Aviv, Zurich, and Mountain View.
Over the past decade, Google has been setting up offices across Africa and is set to train 10 million African on digital skills. So far, some two million African have already successfully undergone the training program, and the company is further supporting some 100,000 developers and boosting some 60 tech startups via its Launchpad Accelerator Africa platform.
Google’s products for the African market, are adapted to run on devices with low RAM capacity (even on smartphones) and unreliable and slow internet connections. On the flip side, the African continent has witnessed an increased interest in machine learning among Africans. This can be seen from events like the 2017 Deep Learning Indaba event held in South Africa and the Data Science Africa 2017 event in Tanzania.