Artificial Intelligence – Africa Tech Digest

SoftBank sinks $200M into Andela, propels company into unicorn territory

29Sep

By Africa Tech DigestNo Comments

AI

SoftBank sinks $200M into Andela, propels company into unicorn territory

Andela, a fully remote company that helps tech companies build remote engineering teams (initially from Africa but now a global market), is currently valued at $1.5 billion following a $200 million Series E round led by SoftBank’s Softbank Vision Fund 2, the $30 billion venture fund of SoftBank Group. Joining SoftBank in the investment was new investor Whale Rock and existing investors including Generation Investment Management, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Spark Capital. After closing this Series E round, Andela has raised a total of $381 million since being founded in Lagos, Nigeria in 2014, according to Crunchbase data. Its last valuation of $700 million came when the company raised a $100 million Series D in 2019. Continue reading Image: Unsplash

Twitter’s photo-cropping algorithm prefers young, beautiful, and light-skinned faces

Results from the company’s AI bias competition are revealing — and helpful Twitter has announced the results of an open competition to find algorithmic bias in its photo-cropping system. The company disabled automatic photo-cropping in March after experiments by Twitter users last year suggested it favored white faces over Black faces. It then launched an algorithmic bug bounty to try and analyze the problem more closely. The competition has confirmed these earlier findings. The top-placed entry showed that Twitter’s cropping algorithm favors faces that are “slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture, and with stereotypically feminine facial traits.” The second and third-placed entries showed that the system was biased against people wi...

Meet the 19-year-old tech genius coding at Ethiopia’s first AI lab

At 19-years-old, Betelhem Dessie is perhaps the youngest pioneer in Ethiopia's fast emerging tech scene, sometimes referred to as "Sheba Valley."Dessie is coordinating a number of nationwide programs run by robotics lab iCog, the Addis Ababa based artificial intelligence (AI) lab that was involved in developing the world famous Sophia the robot. She has four software programs copyrighted solely to her name - including an app developed for the Ethiopian government to map rivers used for irrigation.And it all began when she was just 9.She recalls: "On my 9th birthday I wanted to celebrate so I asked my father for money." When her father said he didn't have any to give her that day, Dessie took matters into her own hands.Making use of the materials around her - her father sold electronics...