Transforming the future for agriculture with Agripredict.

Interview:

Q: What did you work on?

A: I am currently working on improving One-shot Learning with Memory Augmented Neural Networks for image classification problems with drought forecasting models to help mitigate risks for farmers.

Q: Why is this work important to you?

A: Our research has impacted the people in the field like farmers, agro-dealers and everyone in the agriculture chain. AI can make immense impact in Africa. There are so many industries waiting to be transformed by the world of technology, everything from Agriculture to Finance.

Q: What challenges have you ran into?

A: Africa doesn’t currently invest in many data collection mechanisms, so most of the data we use in Africa has to be from third parties like the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). That’s the main challenge we faced when we started. However, as we continue working on this, we were able to put weather stations in our areas of interest. It will take us time to start using this data, but it is an investment worth making. We need to invest in the future.

Researcher Bio:

Patrick Sikalinda is a third-year Computer Science student at the African Leadership University Rwanda. He is the Co-Founder and Data Scientist at Agripredict, where he trains and develops Deep Learning / Machine Learning models.

You can learn more about what Patrick and his team are working on here.

Thank you for sharing your research with us, Patrick! Research like this matters. If you are currently a student and also doing research in the field of AI, reach out to me at charmaine.lee@aiforanyone.org and let’s chat! We would love to feature your work.

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