Digital Science Nigeria (DSN) holds its 8th Artificial Intelligence Boot Camp at the University of Lagos, where a total of 178 young Nigerians are honing their skills in data science and artificial intelligence in preparatory to exploring the vast opportunities the field offers individuals, professionals, the nation and the world at large.
The 8th DSN AI Boot Camp began on the 21st of October and ends today, 25th of October.Data Science Nigeria (DSN) has raised and trained over 900,000 young Nigerians in the last eight years as AI talents and professionals benefitting from the emerging but vast fields of technology, data science and artificial intelligence.
Nurtured by Dr. Bayo Adekanmbi, DSN Founder, the organisation commenced operation as a Non Governmental Organization (NGO) in 2016 with the vision to democratise the knowledge of data science by training One million young Nigerians/AI talents to be job ready to tap into and benefit from the growing global AI & technology space, and the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution.
The DSN Founder underscored the fact that data is the new oil of the World and Nigeria must be well positioned to take advantage of the development just as India and other tech inclined nations.DSN’s mission to empower and train 1 million AI talents pan-Nigeria is perhaps seen as ambitious as it extends to every nook and cranny of the country.
“The mission is to empower them with the skills of data science be it data analytics, machine learning, data engineering and all the diverse segments of artificial intelligence” reiterates Chinazo Anebelundu, Project Director for the DSN 2024 AI Boot Camp.
Chinazo Anebelundu and Omotayo Olorunfemi, Community & Project Manager, Community & Project Manager, DSN, also added that the Boot Camp is part of the motivation for the young AI / tech enthusiasts. “Annually, we organize Boot camps where we get young talents, hot brains, students who we have taught machines learning, python programming language in thir variouscommunities, we bring them together to learn from one another, expose them to current best practices in the field, AI applications and use cases”.
The 178 participants presently attending the 2024 Boot Camp emerged from thousands of entries! The standard is to make all interested participants across the country (community members) participate in a competitive online Hackathon which uses Zindi Hackathon for coders.
A participant submits his entry online, with no human interference, the leader board automatically rates the Best performing models as they are submitted by participants.
Therefore, selection is merit based as ratings are done automatically in order of quality. A cut-off is established in this case, first 200 out of thousands of entries submitted.
The DSN 2024 AI Boot Camp is featuring 25 speakers from across the globe as faculty to speak with participants, teach and motivate them.
These are from sterling organisations such as ESRI, Microsoft, University Avenue, Madison; Stanford University; Boston University; Mastercard Foundation, Olabisi Onabanjo University; and Nit Hub among others.
