Many companies, like Green Views, have found Ghana’s business environment friendly. The latest to enter the market is technology giant—Google— which has opened its first ever Artificial Intelligence Centre in Africa in the capital city of Ghana, Accra.
The Accra AI Centre, will support diagnosis, treatment and prediction of outcomes in clinical situations. The AI centre will also transform agriculture by helping to generate accurate and controlled techniques that help provide guidance and understanding about water, nutrient management, optimal harvesting and planting times, as well as the right times for crop rotation.
In order to ensure diversity, the Accra lab is to be overseen by 10 experts from Senegal, Uganda, USA, Israel, Nigeria, Ireland, Canada, UK and Lesotho. Together with their Ghanaian counterparts, they will utilise the Accra lab to meet the increasing demand for machine learning and research across the continent.
Head of Google AI Accra, Moustapha Cisse, speaking at the launch, threw some light on how AI can be used in agriculture to benefit farmers. “AI can be used to diagnose certain diseases in crops, so that stakeholders can take early action to help mitigate some of the issues that our farmers face. So, artificial intelligence is very important in the area of agriculture,” he said.
Again, he added that the centre will also serve as a citadel for learning where it will collaborate with other institution around the world to solve challenges on the continent.
“We will work and collaborate with institutions across the continent; the team itself is very international; it is already about 10 people coming from more than 12 different countries— Africans and non-Africans as well— so we are looking forward to collaborating with African Institutions.
Our goal is to advance the frontiers of this science so we expect to have a scientific impact but also we expect to, through collaborations with different institutions, work on local challenges; have an impact to be on our field by applying the technology to agriculture, to health and to other areas,” he said.
Accra now joins the likes of others such as Paris, Zurich, Tokyo, Beijing, Montreal, Toronto, Seattle, Cambridge/Boston, Tel Aviv/Haifa, New York and San Franciso in hosting a Google AI lab.
The centre is expected to gather machine learning researchers and engineers in Accra to facilitate local AI development. Green Views is ready to host all the expatriates that Google is bringing in from abroad in their ultramodern apartments located at Airport City in Accra which gives maximum comfort like never before to all tenants.