Opportunities in Data Science and ML: Ghana and Beyond.
Introduction
The Twitter Space started with the panelists Jade Abbot and Martha Teye introducing themselves.
Martha
In her third year of university, she embarked on an unexpected journey into the world of AI. While interning at the Earth Observation Research & Innovation Center at the University of Mines, Tarkwa, she was tasked with creating an ML model to detect malicious files, despite having no prior knowledge of machine learning. Determined to succeed, she threw herself into researching ML and learning how to code, relying on resources like StackOverflow to help her overcome errors. By her final year, she had developed a deep interest in AI and focused her final project on NLP. After graduation, she landed a job at Zlitch Technologies, where she continued to explore and expand her AI skills. One particularly interesting project she worked on was a chatbot that recommends GTP cloth styles based on a customer's responses to the chatbot's questions. Though her AI journey was unexpected, it has been a fulfilling and rewarding experience.
Jade
From a young age, she was fascinated by the idea of building her own robot, fueled by a love of science fiction shared with her dad. This passion led her to pursue a degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, followed by a Masters in the field. She then gained real-world experience by working on an ML project with RetroRabbit before co-founding Masakhane NLP for African Languages, a groundbreaking organization dedicated to improving the availability and quality of natural language processing resources for African languages. Through her work, she is committed to advancing the field of AI and making it more accessible to everyone, while promoting the development of technologies that can benefit all communities, regardless of their linguistic background.
Essential Skills for the Field of AI & ML
The following are some of the essential skills, shared by Jade and Martha that one needs to enter the field of AI and ML :
Critical Thinking - to ask the right questions about your data
Probability and Statistics - especially if you go into research
Programming Skills - to code models
Software engineering skills - to deploy your models
Opportunities shared by Jade:
Deep Mind Scholarships
Masakhane
Be part of an AI/ML community
Be in the right slack channels so you see opportunities
Opportunities shared by Martha:
Grace Hooper conference
PyLadies Ghana
PyData Ghana
Andela
Other Opportunities shared:
Current opportunities
After the discussions, there were several questions asked by the audience. Listen to the full audio here.