…pegs #5m grant per researcher
The Federal Government has reiterated its commitment to revamp the ailing economy by stepping up the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in critical sectors of the nation’s economy.
Besides, it said it would leverage cutting-edge technologies through artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping lives and businesses.
This, according to Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa CCIE, would explore and use AI in bolstering productivity in critical sectors of the nation’s economy.
Inuwa said this while delivering a Keynote Address on “Artificial Intelligence: Effective Communication for National Security” at the 2023 Security and Spokespersons Awards and Conference held in Abuja.
Apparently harping on Artificial Intelligence which was already changing daily lives, Inuwa insisted AI if employ would improve human health, safety, and productivity.
This, Inuwa averred that AI was beyond a tool as it remained a new way of building a relationship between humans and machines.
Inuwa said: “In building that relationship, we need to look beyond just having a tool we use for our daily activities and start thinking in the direction of developing a system which can help meet certain human needs.”
While highlighting benefits of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, the Director-General said that the algorithm which was the AI that powers social media was a machine that needed to be trained and controlled, in order to avoid it spiralling out of control.
Inuwa went on: “Due to the happenings on social media, industry practitioners are pushing for explainability in the AI, also referred to as black box within the AI algorithm.
“Imagine having a system that makes decisions for us and does not understand the way it came about making that decision, now, that is indeed a red flag, having AI go out of control, so, we need to get AI to be always for humanity, because it is the most existential threat to humanity today.
“Countries around the world are making efforts toward deciphering the functionalities of artificial intelligence and coming up with policies and putting standards in place to ensure they are AI ready countries, and so Nigeria cannot take the back seat.
“In Nigeria, we are looking at it from three perspectives; having AI ready principles, data and AI ready security.
“This invariably means that as a matter of principle, we should have redlines that AI must not cross to achieve this last year we started our journey by crowd- sourcing on how to build National AI Policy and we have the first draft ready.
“When the present administration came onboard, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu mandated the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to accelerate the diversification of the Nigerian economy by enhancing productivity in critical sectors through technological innovation, and we strongly believe that to achieve this, AI is our best tool to use in that regard.
“To take this further, we launched a call for research, where we are offering a grant to forty- five Nigerians to do research on Artificial Intelligence, so that we get a feedback on how to use AI in Health, Education, Agriculture, Finance, Security and many more.
“We are giving up to N5million to each researcher because we want to co-create and design the policy collaboratively, not the government using arm chair theories to come up with the policies, we need everybody to be onboard.”
The NITDA Boss who also emphasised the need to speed up efforts to connect the unconnected in order for them to be digitally feasible ahead of the AI adoption and deployment in the country, added that if they were infeasible, the AI would not consider them while making decisions.
Inuwa who went on to explain other perspectives, including data and security, canvassed global standards for the regulation of AI.
He said: “We are seeing how AI is becoming biased, gender biased and even exhibiting racist behaviour, partly because of the data used to develop it. So, if you develop an AI system and train it in another country and decide to take it elsewhere, it will not work, hence, the need for global data for every one use to train it.”
Besides, he harpedl on Nigeria’s abundant resources, talents and youthful population, saying that the country had a competitive advantage in becoming the frontier in digital technological innovation.
“Although we lost out during the first, second and third Industrial Revolutions because they needed capital investment but in the fourth, we can use our talents to compete with any country in the world, given the fact that talent is the human component of technology,” he said.
“To achieve this, the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, unveiled the Strategic Plan for the Ministry which has strategic pillars, including, Knowledge, Policies, Infrastructure, and Trade”, the DG added.
However, Inuwa stressed that AI had become a top priority for NITDA as the Agency’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR) underpins the attention drawn to it.
The event which was the 5th in its series was organised by Image Merchant Promotion Ltd. in conjunction with Coalition Society Organizations also featured presentations on Security and Spokespersons Communication Awards as well as goodwill messages.
