DSN claims to have impacted 500,000 students over the last five years
DSN claims to have impacted 500,000 students over the last five years and plans to develop two million AI talent in Africa
It was a memorable Friday last week as Data Science Nigeria (DSN) celebrated five years of innovation and impact while working towards its overall goal of raising one million Artificial Intelligence (AI) talents and leading the development of AI solutions that improve the quality of life and well-being of over two billion people in emerging economies.
Having presented the team's agenda to guests in Lagos four years ago, Mr Adekanmbi has continued to drive the vision forward through annual agendas and plans. A celebration event was held to commemorate the team's achievement of reaching over 500,000 online and offline learners, as well as publishing high-impact research papers at the world's leading artificial intelligence conferences.
In addition to large-scale experiments, DSN's SpotOn geospatial-enabled retail optimization platform has assisted over eight million learners in Nigeria with its EdTech adaptive learning engine. A number of world-class organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the MasterCard Foundation, AI Commons, the World Bank, Chevron Nigeria, Shell Nigeria, and Access Bank have benefited from the DSN solution delivery platform.
Following in the footsteps of DSN's founder and lead mentor, Bayo Adekanmbi, the organization's work has garnered academic and social impact awards around the world and has been recognized as a model for scalable learning, research, and development of social good solutions.
In New York, the Association for Computing Machinery organized the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC' 20), where one of DSN's papers on the application of artificial intelligence to financial inclusion won the best poster award. The ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC' 20) is the world's premier conference on the interface of economics and computer science, and it was organized by the Association for Computing Machinery.
He also talked about some of the team's innovations, which are all geared toward furthering the team's inclusive learning mission. This includes a learning platform with over 20,000 artificial intelligence learning videos – freely available content from leading international universities – that has been curated on an external drive and distributed freely throughout Nigeria in order to address the issue of poor internet access, among other things.
He continued, "In addition, we published Africa's first Artificial Intelligence children's book, which is currently being distributed for free as part of our train-the-teachers program, which seeks to accelerate the adoption of digital skills across African schools."
Additional enhancements to the DSN's educational delivery have been made, including participation in industry-level projects, hackathons, learning clubs, professional learning groups, primary/secondary learning clubs, and a female-only artificial intelligence learning support network.
The Digital Science Network (DSN) is approaching its fifth anniversary and is implementing a dual business model, in which it will monetize its research in order to sustain its non-profit efforts while also making a profit. In addition to Nigeria and the United Kingdom, DSN AI Innovation Limited, the company's new subsidiary will focus on the development and deployment of advanced artificial intelligence solutions in the Fintech, EdTech, and MedTech eras.
A broader network of domestic and international partners, as well as independent consultants, will support the company's consulting and training practices, as the company welcomes expert partners to assist it in delivering on its shared value business model.
A new logo has also been unveiled by DSN, which reflects the company's global positioning as well as its expansion beyond Nigeria. Incorporating a global map of the world and highlighting the DSN short name identity, the logo expresses the organization's ambition to provide high-impact artificial intelligence solutions around the world while also expanding its free training and research network beyond Nigeria's borders.
Due to the new partnership business models adopted by DSN, the company can collaborate with more independent consultants and experts around the world on an as-needed basis, while maintaining an efficient structure supported by the best full-time staff (shareholders), investors, expert project consultants, interns and strategic partners/mentors as well as the largest AI learning and research community in Africa.
