This AI Expert From Senegal Is Helping Showcase Africans In STEM

Not only has Adji Bousso Dieng, an AI researcher from Senegal, contributed to the field of generative modeling and about to become one of the first black female faculty in Computer Science in the Ivy League, she is also helping Africans in STEM tell their own success stories. Dieng, who is currently a researcher at Google and an incoming computer science faculty at Princeton, works in an area of Artificial Intelligence called generative modeling. "It allows you to learn from data without needing any supervision," she said, "Generative models have many real-world applications with regard to natural language processing, computer vision, healthcare, robotics, and in a range of sciences." In addition to this, Dieng started The Africa I Know (TAIK), a platform that showcases Africans who've had successful careers; highlight how Africans are leveraging technology to solve developmental problems –in agriculture, health and education– and narrate African history as told by Africans. "I founded TAIK to unearth the success stories of Africa and its people and to foster an economic and social consciousness in Africa," she said, adding that TAIK's volunteers are a group of eager and young Africans coming from every region of the continent and that the content is in both English and French.