A Nigerian university don, Dr Ifeyinwa Nsude has been appointed as a member of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Social Innovation in Bordeaux, France. The appointment was on the premise of her attendance and presentation at the 2019 Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Social Innovation in Bordeaux.
This was made known in her release made available to journalists and other professional colleagues on the platform of African Council for Communication Education, Nigeria Chapter.
Nsude, who is a Senior Lecturer and the immediate past head at the Department of Mass Communication, Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki, South East Nigeria, was grateful to God and the Management of the university for sponsoring her trip to France. She is also selected as a member of the Scientific Committee of the 2021 UNESCO Chair Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence and Social Innovation. The committee is to review the papers submitted before the symposium and evaluate the same after the Colloquium in Bordeaux.
She described the recent appointment as a challenge to her and an opportunity to serve humanity better, research more on Artificial Intelligence and how Africans can design their own AI to suit their environment.
While speaking to our correspondent, she said the appointment implied more diversification and interdisciplinary collaboration. She posited that her first task will be to establish a link between UNESCO and Ebonyi State University, as well as Nigeria, particularly in the area of AI. She averred that she would be more focused on finding relevance for AI in communication and for deployment to solve other social problems confronting the country in particular and Africa in general. She said, “We are talking about achieving the SDGs.
Right now, there is an urgent need to tackle the issue of attaining these goals of SDGs. We started from MDGs but we couldn’t reach the goals, now it is SDGs. How are we coping with attaining such goals in 2030? How can AI help us to achieve these objectives of SDGs? Why the SDGs are good is because they summarized our social problems. Now, let me give you one example, we are talking about zero hunger in Nigeria. How can AI help us to achieve zero hunger through Agriculture? Now, the emphasis is on how our own Scientists, Mathematicians, Engineers, can design indigenous AI that will actually help us to tackle our problems.”
She further challenged communication scholars to create the needed awareness on the design of indigenous artificial intelligence,the benefits and the challenges.
