The Artificial Intelligence Institute of South Africa (AIISA) was established this week by Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Mondli Gungubele in collaboration with Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Johannesburg (UJ).
The fourth industrial revolution in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and food processing are the three economic sectors on which AIISA will concentrate.
A number of other organisations are also making efforts to build AI. One of these is Lelapa AI, which just two weeks ago began operating as an African-focused research and product laboratory.
Lelapa AI’s CEO, Pelonomi Moiloa, stated that the company sees a future in which artificial intelligence would assist people in resolving modern problems.
Lelapa AI places a strong emphasis on natural language processing, enabling users to interact with services in their native tongue. Gaining trust and understanding requires language, according to Moiloa.
The Deep Learning Indaba, an annual conference on artificial intelligence and machine learning in Africa since 2017, is where the hub got its start.
Moiloa referred to the national health department’s initiative MomConnect, which supports women’s maternal health through cell phone technology, and said that AI creates solutions “that are safer, solutions that require limited resources due to cost or because the resources do not exist, like data.”
AI is helping small-scale farmers in other parts of Africa with crop monitoring, micro-financing for African enterprises, and data analytics to improve business performance. The AIISA aims to help mimic the same advantageous impacts of AI.