Scientists from Uganda and Tanzania participated in this year’s Grand Challenges Annual Meeting (GCAM 2023) in Dakar, Senegal, demonstrating the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve health and food challenges. This is an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Teofrida Maginga, a lecturer at Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture, showcases the Swahili-based Chat Generating Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) chatbot he developed to assist communities and farmers with early detection of diseases on maize farms. did.
“We have developed a sensor that we place on the farm to detect the ‘mood’ of the corn. “Every time a disease or invasive insect attacks your plants, you will be notified with details on what exactly your corn is dealing with and what the solution is,” Mazinga said. east african.
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The quest was for a simple device that could be placed in the field to inform them of what was happening in the field, while using low power and minimizing interaction with individual farmers.
“Chatbots allow you to ask simple questions and provide scope for generating appropriate answers. We are committed to providing ChatGPT chatbots to farmers and making them easy to use. I did.”
From Uganda, Joseph Mulabbi presented his innovation, EpiWatch, a ChatGPT-4 AI community monitoring system for infectious disease surveillance.
“You download the app, take a photo of a sick animal, upload the photo to the system, and the technology can immediately detect the disease the animal is suffering from,” he said.
“They then tell us how to treat the animal and make recommendations for veterinarians. It gives us data on what diseases are where and we can also stop viruses from jumping from animals to humans.” , we will be able to stop outbreaks before they occur,” he added.
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Other innovations on display included an AI-powered decision support for antibiotic prescribing by Nana Kofi Kwakyi from Ghana and a prototype of the “Your Choice” app developed by Caroline Govason from South Africa. there was. Goverson’s innovation is a chatbot that helps fight stigma against people with HIV.
The Grand Challenge is the brainchild of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which seeks initiatives that foster innovation to solve critical global health and development problems.