• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Data Science Nigeria prepares youths for fourth industrial revolution

Data Science Nigeria prepares youths for fourth industrial revolution
Data Science Nigeria (DSN), a non-profit organisation managed by the Data Scientists Network Foundation is scaling up skills of Nigerian youths in Artificial Intelligence and technology that will help in solving economic challenges and prepare them to compete globally in the fourth industrial revolution.
Speaking to journalists at the grand finale of the Data Science Nigeria 2019 Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp in Lagos at the weekend, Olubayo Adekanmbi, founder of DSN said that the bootcamp was an effort to scale up Nigerian youths to have skills enough for the future, especially with the ongoing consensus that Artificial Intelligence will take away lots of jobs in the next few years.
“We need to scale up our young ones to have the skill that will make them employable in the next 10 to 20 years. A lot of jobs we have today will become archaic in the next five years, which is why we have taken the bull by the horns to start building capacity in AI,” he said.
Analysts say that Nigeria, which has the youngest population in Africa, with over 50 percent of its population within the age bracket of 15 to 60 years old, needs to be fully prepared for the fourth industrial revolution.
At the DSN bootcamp, intelligent students from all over the country are trained by international AI experts and equipped with problem solving skills through the use of data analytics and technology.
“We have 26 international AI experts from the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, and other parts of the world who have come to teach these students. The knowledge gained will be taken back to the different schools and communities. That is how we intend to spread knowledge which they can use to capitalize technology development in Nigeria and help the youths to be prepared for industry jobs,” Adekanbi said.
Kazeem Hakeem who emerged winner at the 2019 Artificial Intelligence Hackathon after the 6-day bootcamp, has gotten the opportunity to study abroad for a Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town South Africa.
Lawrence Muthoga, lead developer for Microsoft Africa, which is one of the program sponsors said the boot camp is all about training the next generation of data scientist, as what they have learnt are the fundamentals of machine learning and deep learning.
“We have built actual solutions on this. The students have participated in competitions and have won awards based on the skills that they have shown. At Microsoft, we are platform builders. We have platforms that enable data scientist to use our deep learning and machine learning and these students have been wonderful and smart,” he said.
The DSN bootcamp which is supported by Microsoft, Bluechip technologies, Terragon group, Axa Mansard, Facebook and other global technology organisations is aimed at creating as many AI specialists as possible in Nigeria.
According to Adekanbi, “if we do not address AI capacity today we may go into another cycle I call digital slavery because we do not have skills that makes us capable to develop solutions that can solve our problems in this part of the world.”
Also speaking, Michael Harper, implementation analyst, Blowminder, said that the boot camp has been a wonderful experience.  “Dealing with students for the first time and seeing so much potential, energy and willingness to learn new skills intrigued me and I am really excited to see what these students will come up with in the future,” he said.
Data Science Nigeria has also launched the first Artificial Intelligence book for primary and secondary schools in Nigeria. The book is an effort towards AI knowledge democratization as it simplifies the concept of artificial intelligence in a friendly manner for the young ones, with a view to stimulating their curiosity and drive their interest in learning about AI.