Ai Kenya Podcast episode 4: Repurposing Artificial Intelligence for problem solving featuring Babusi Nyoni
November 24, 2020
What connection does a dance app have with Perkinson’s disease? The fourth Ai Kenya Podcast episode features Babusi Nyoni, an AI innovator based in the Netherlands, touching on his journey to becoming an AI innovator. This episode was recorded in June 2019, following the Majadiliano Tech tour that saw Babusi Nyoni touring Kakamega, Kisumu, Nairobi, Mombasa, Muhoroni and Bondo to inspire high school students and the general public on matters innovation and technology. The program facilitated by Hon. Michael Onyango was aimed at motivating those who felt that they don’t have a place to participate in the current Artificial Intelligence zeitgeist.
Babusi grew up in Zimbabwe where he attended a public high school and later started working in Artificial Intelligence in 2014. He had since worked on various AI projects including:
Banternator: An artificial intelligent football commentator for Heineken Global in 2016. The aim of the project was to enable Heineken fans to interact with a real-time football commentator in a fluid manner. They trained a machine learning model using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to react to certain emotional moments from football fans using data obtained from tweets related to previous football matches specifically in South Africa.
Predicting the next Refugee Migration crisis: In the same year (2016), he created a prototype for the prediction of Africa’s next refugee crisis using AI.
AI GQOM: In 2018 he taught a robot how to make a subgenre of South African house music.
Vosho Dance App: Later in 2018 he created an app for rating popular South African dance move called Vo’sho using pose estimation. The Vosho dance app was part of his AI series aimed at understanding the limits of AI in the African context and make the bleeding edge technology accessible to a wider audience. The app estimates various points of the body when performing the dance and gives a score out of a hundred on the browser.
Parkinson’s disease diagnosis: In early 2019 he created a prototype for early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. This was an extension of the technology used in the Vosho dance App for pose estimation and parameterization for greater impact on society targeting people with limited access to healthcare. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement. It is associated with tremors of the body and stiffness or slowing down movement.
In his response as to how his experience innovating in AI has been given his highest education level was high school, he noted that his career played a big role in his work. He added that it was hard to prove the credibility of his proposals for campaigns on AI due to the fact he was the only person who understood the technology that worked, the only person who had no university education, and the only person of color in rooms where such projects were discussed. However, he was able to obtain organizational validation by working on personal projects.
In a way of giving back to the community, Babusi launched Ulwazi Accelerator in Zimbabwe, a program aimed at training those interested in AI to improve their skills and gain a basic understanding of the technology. Upon completion, the cohorts are placed on paid work to gain experience that can be applied in other places.
On his view on Africa’s future in AI, Babusi noted that the technology has matured enough to be used in practical implementations, and Africa as a continent full of innovative minds and challenges, it provides unique opportunities. He added that the high number of workforce in the continent makes Africa perfectly placed to contribute the most important part of AI.
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