AI for agriculture, environmental protection and sustainability

A key challenge in Africa is the lack of sufficient domain experts to effectively solve the problems in health, agriculture, education, transport, etc. Artificial Intelligence with all the current advances provides hope for a solution by enabling the automation of these varied expert tasks. Africa is largely an agro-economy where majority of the people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. In this talk I will give some examples of interventions in AI being employed by the AI and Data Science research lab (AIR) in Makerere University and the UN Pulse Lab to address some of these challenges. I will talk about automating disease diagnosis in the field on smartphones and crowdsourcing surveillance data from farmers with smartphones and how these impact the livelihoods of these farmers. I will also give some examples in other fields like health where AI is impacting the livelihoods of people in Africa.