Google is ready to open an AI research centre in Accra, Ghana this year and will bring top machinew learning researchers and engineers in the centre.
According to the company, “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.”
“We’re committed to collaborating with local universities and research centers, as well as working with policy makers on the potential uses of AI in Africa.”
Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow, Google AI, and Moustapha Cisse, Staff Research Scientist and lead of Google AI Center Accra, the researchers who are in charge of this will combine their research interests in AI and machine learning and their experience in Africa to push the boundaries of AI while solving challenges in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, and education.
The new AI center in Accra joins the list of other locations where we focus on AI, including Paris, Zurich, Tokyo, Beijing, Montreal, Toronto, Seattle, Cambridge/Boston, Tel Aviv/Haifa, New York, and our Mountain View/San Francisco headquarters.
Over the past 10 years in which Google has had offices in Africa, 10 million Africans have been targeted to benefit from its digital skills training program with 2 million people having already completed the course, and it’s supporting 100,000 developers and over 60 tech startups through its Launchpad Accelerator Africa. Google is also adapting its products to make it easy for people to discover the best of the internet, even on low-RAM smartphones or unstable network connections.
In recent years the firm says it has witnessed an increasing interest in machine learning research across the continent. Events like Data Science Africa 2017 in Tanzania, the 2017 Deep Learning Indaba event in South Africa, and follow-on IndabaX events in 2018 in multiple countries have shown an exciting and continuing growth of the computer science research community in Africa.