Arnold Daniel Makes Ghana Proud

In today’s digital age, technological advancement is certainly going to reduce the global employment rate. According to an Oxford University study, the first sectors mainly impacted by automation are transportation and logistics, office and administration, and production labor. Technological development spells imminent danger for telemarketers, power plant operators, loan officers, truck drivers, and receptionists. Spearheading this innovation is the recent frenzy in the development of Artificial Intelligence technology.

Artificial Intelligence is the technology that allows computers to imitate human-like thinking patterns. A. I fluctuate with a myriad of graduates, computer professionals with years of experience, and Ph.D. holders from the most developed countries. These numerous professionals come together and participate in contests with some tasks likened to developing an algorithm that uses computer vision to detect an endangered 

species of starfish or develop a computer algorithm that could automatically transcribe obscure languages. 

Among such competitors is Arnold Daniel, a boy from Accra. This emerging AI talent has proven himself a force to be reckoned with in numerous machine learning competitions. Even as recently as a week ago placing No.2 in a Google Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge. Equally more impressive is the fact he is self-taught. 

His passion for Artificial Intelligence began in March 2020 when he was only 16 years old. He dedicated his quarantine to researching Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. There are no AI courses offered at his school as a result, he primarily went online. He recalled, “I had to rely on free internet courses. I took a few free machine learning courses from numerous top universities and a lot of Youtube tutorials.” 

However, after months of lecture notes and tutorials, he decided to run enter his first machine learning competition. According to him he soon discovered there was a theory and practical knowledge. He says “For my first few competitions my results were unmotivating.” Regardless slowly and surely he started to climb higher and higher in these online machine learning competitions. 

Amongst these was a task where he built an algorithm that automatically transforms spoken Hausa into transcribed Hausa. It may sound simple but it is quite complex. For one he has to account for the different dialects and intonations of the various regions which speak Hausa on the African continent. The challenge may be simpler if there was a large quantity(2TB) of audio data to work with. Arnold Daniel explained “I had to manually modify a powerful deep learning model to be able to work with the Hausa language. This required I had an understanding of how to write in Hausa.” It took him forty-eight hours without sleep to create the algorithm and his efforts rewarded him with a second-place medal. 

“Where do I see Ghana’s AI development in the next five years? I believe there is an AI bubble coming, many young people in the country would step up and start incorporating Artificial Intelligence and blockchain technology to solve problems in the financial, transportation, agricultural, and even in the land registry office.”