The future of AI research is in Africa

In 2016, the Johannesburg team at IBM Research discovered that the process of reporting cancer data to the government, which used it to inform national health policies, took four years after diagnosis in hospitals. In the US, the equivalent data collection and analysis takes only two years. The additional lag turned out to be due in part to the unstructured nature of the hospitals' pathology reports. Human experts were reading each case and classifying it into one of 42 different cancer types, but the free-form text on the reports made this very time-consuming. So the researchers went to work on a machine-learning model that could label the reports automatically.