Senegalese video game fan uses AI to fight malaria – 12/24/2023 – Health

When she was a teenager, Rokhaya Diagne used to retreat to her brother’s room, where she played online video games for hours, day after day, until her mother finally had enough.

“My mom said, ‘This is an addiction,'” Diagne says. “She said if I didn’t stop, she would send me to the hospital to see a psychiatrist.”

Her mother’s interventions worked. As much as Diagne’s passion for computers has, more than anything, intensified, she has redirected her energies to higher goals than leveling up in Call of Duty.

Now, his goals include using artificial intelligence to help the world eradicate malaria by 2030, a project he is working on at his healthcare startup.

Video games “taught me a lot of things,” says Diagne, 25, a Senegalese computer science student who lives in Dakar, the country’s capital. “They gave me problem-solving skills.”

“I don’t regret playing these things,” he adds.

A quick speaker, wearing jeans and a hijab, Diagne is part of a subset of Africa’s huge youth population whose lives have been shaped by screens and the internet — and who are connected to the world to a degree no previous generation could imagine.

For young Africans interested in technology-related careers, the internet has offered a powerful complement to an education system that some experts fear is harming Africa’s ability to harness its young people. Although more students are graduating than ever before, schools still rely heavily on lectures.

The abundance of free online coding boot camps, robotics classes and lectures from universities like Stanford, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are having a huge impact across Africa, inspiring engineering careers and generating startup ideas.

While some of her colleagues are more passionate about sensor fusion or robotics, Diagne is interested in AI and deep machine learning. She helped create an award-winning networking app for meeting like-minded people — like Tinder, but for tech nerds. And she founded a startup called Afyasense (she took “afya,” or health, from Swahili, an East African language) for her disease detection projects using AI.

“She is someone who is a pleasure to talk to because of the quality of the questions she asks and also the answers she gives,” says Ismaïla Seck, a leader in Senegal’s growing AI community.

Like many other young people in Africa’s tech boom, Diagne is at the center of overlapping phenomena on the continent — a growing educated middle class that is raising even more educated children, who, with each stroke of a keyboard, have embraced the idea that The continent’s biggest problems can be solved.

Diagne wants to use AI to improve health outcomes in the region, a choice she made after a series of childhood illnesses landed her in hospitals in Dakar that struggled to provide consistent, quality care.

“I know the mistakes that are unfortunately made,” she says.

Diagne’s determination earned him recognition. His malaria project recently won an award at an AI conference in Ghana and a national award in Senegal for social entrepreneurship, as well as $8,000 in funding.

She says she was reserved as a child, but always had a huge interest in research, fueled by her father, a retired professor and literature writer. When faced with his daughter’s questions about how the world works or about her Muslim faith, he would make her try to find the answer for herself, and reward her with apples, her favorite fruit to this day.

She enrolled at the École Supérieure Polytechnique de Dakar as a biology student and obtained an internship at the Main Hospital of Dakar. But days of reviewing lab samples helped her realize this kind of work wasn’t for her.

“I wanted much bigger challenges than being afraid of the bacteria in my body,” he says. “I wanted innovation and to be able to create and use my brain for something instead of predictable outcomes that I just followed.”

Discouraged that she had made the wrong choice, Diagne dropped out of college and spent a year planning her next steps.

She remembered something her brother used to say: Do harder things because there is less competition. She chose bioinformatics, the science of storing complex biological data and analyzing it, to find new perspectives. Options for studying it in Senegal were extremely limited.

But the American University of Science and Technology in Dakar had opened and offered a computer science course, an area she decided would provide a solid foundation for future study in bioinformatics.

The university’s approach emphasizes applied learning, meaning instructors assign projects to students and expect them to complete them largely on their own. And tasks always aim to solve a local problem.

One project tasked students with building a drone capable of carrying a 100-kilogram payload a distance of 10 km, an act that could help alleviate polluting truck congestion outside the port of Dakar. Some of the university’s joint projects have already yielded promising startups, such as Solarbox, which began as a task to build a solar-powered electric motorcycle.

Diagne, who is now a senior, was assigned to send a drone underwater to collect information about fish, as well as seagrass, which absorbs carbon.

“When I started, I didn’t even know what seagrass was,” she says. “I had only seen an underwater drone in movies. I didn’t even know the difference between the types of fish.”

She dedicated herself to the project, even hiring a fisherman she saw on the beach to teach her how to fish, so she could learn more about various species from someone she knew from experience. Her team is moving on to the next phase: building her own underwater drone.

While looking for another project, she discovered that global health officials were working to eradicate malaria before the end of the decade. One of Senegal’s biggest health problems is the lack of rapid and reliable malaria testing in rural areas. So she set out to design a better system for identifying positive cases.

Diagne remembered the boredom he felt in the hospital laboratory, examining sample after sample. This mechanical act seemed tailor-made for artificial intelligence to tackle.

Her university helped her find a lab operator who provided her with a dataset of cells that she fed into a deep learning tool, training her to identify positive cases. Users will connect microscopes to a laptop loaded with their AI program — including 3D-printed microscopes that are cheap and small enough to be deployed in rural areas.

As his malaria project nears market launch, Diagne already knows what he plans to do next: use AI to detect cancer cells.

Diagne has relied on leaders at his university and West Africa’s growing tech community, who have been eager to offer advice as his projects gain recognition.

And she’s ready to help those who are following in her footsteps.

“A lot of people are contacting me, saying, ‘How did you do this? How did you do that?'” she says. “I can guide them and show them the way.”