The COVID-19 pandemic has presented significant challenges in Nigeria's public health systems since the first case reported on February 27, 2020. This study investigates key factors that contribute to state vulnerability, quantifying them through a composite risk score integrating population density (weight 0.2), poverty (0.4), access to healthcare (0.3), and age risk (0.1), adjusted by normalized case rates per 100,000. States were categorized into low-, medium-, and high-density areas to analyze trends and identify hotspots using geographic information system (GIS) mapping. The findings reveal that high-density urban areas, such as Lagos, accounting for 35.4% of national cases, had the highest risk scores (Lagos: 673.47 vs. national average: 28.16). These results align with global and local studies on the spatial variability of COVID-19 in Nigeria, including international frameworks such as the CDC Social Vulnerability Index. Google Trends data highlight variations in public health awareness, serving as a supplementary analysis to contextualize vulnerability. The risk score provides a prioritization tool for policymakers to allocate testing, vaccines, and healthcare resources to high-risk areas, though data gaps and rural underreporting call for further research. This framework can extend to other infectious diseases, offering lessons for future pandemics in resource-limited settings.

We propose LAGO - Language Similarity-Aware Graph Optimization - a novel approach for few-shot cross-lingual embedding inversion attacks, addressing critical privacy vulnerabilities in multilingual NLP systems. Unlike prior work in embedding inversion attacks that treat languages independently, LAGO explicitly models linguistic relationships through a graph-based constrained distributed optimization framework. By integrating syntactic and lexical similarity as edge constraints, our method enables collaborative parameter learning across related languages. Theoretically, we show this formulation generalizes prior approaches, such as ALGEN, which emerges as a special case when similarity constraints are relaxed. Our framework uniquely combines Frobenius-norm regularization with linear inequality or total variation constraints, ensuring robust alignment of cross-lingual embedding spaces even with extremely limited data (as few as 10 samples per language). Extensive experiments across multiple languages and embedding models demonstrate that LAGO substantially improves the transferability of attacks with 10-20% increase in Rouge-L score over baselines. This work establishes language similarity as a critical factor in inversion attack transferability, urging renewed focus on language-aware privacy-preserving multilingual embeddings.

Kuda is a money app for Africans on a mission to make financial services accessible, affordable and rewarding for every African on the planet. We're a tribe of passionate and diverse people who dreamed of building an inclusive money app that Africans would love so it's only right that we ended up with the name'Kuda' which means'love' in Shona, a language spoken in the southern part of Africa. We're giving Africans around the world a better alternative to traditional finance by delivering money transfers, smart budgeting and instant access to credit through digital devices. We've raised over $90 million from some of the world's most respected institutional investors, and we're rolling out our game-changing services globally from our offices in Nigeria, South Africa, and the UK. Role Overview: This is a BI Analyst role dedicated to operational reporting and analytics.

The United States and the European Union plan to release a new artificial intelligence road map that prioritizes security and risk management at the next meeting of their joint trade and technology council, a senior US official said on Thursday. Marisa Lago, commerce undersecretary for international trade, told an event hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce that the document would be released at the next ministerial meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, on December 5. "We think that this is a mutual priority that is going to grow in scope as new AI applications come online and as more authoritarian regimes are taking a very different approach to the issues of security and risk management," she said. Lago said US and EU officials felt the document would be integral to ensuring that new technologies were deployed in line with shared democratic values and free-market principles. It should also help ensure that small- and medium-sized US and EU businesses are not locked out of new digital markets. US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo met virtually with EU Commission executive vice president Margrethe Vestager on Wednesday to discuss TTC work, with a focus on issues such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and information communication technology services, the Commerce Department said.

The United States and the European Union plan to release a new artificial intelligence road map that prioritizes security and risk management at the next meeting of their joint trade and technology council, a senior US official said on Thursday. Marisa Lago, commerce undersecretary for international trade, told an event hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce that the document would be released at the next ministerial meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, on December 5. "We think that this is a mutual priority that is going to grow in scope as new AI applications come online and as more authoritarian regimes are taking a very different approach to the issues of security and risk management," she said. Lago said US and EU officials felt the document would be integral to ensuring that new technologies were deployed in line with shared democratic values and free-market principles. It should also help ensure that small- and medium-sized US and EU businesses are not locked out of new digital markets. US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo met virtually with EU Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager on Wednesday to discuss TTC work, with a focus on issues such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and information communication technology services, the Commerce Department said.

Lee's technical explanations sit alongside Chen's fictional short stories to produce an exploration of the perils and possibilities of AI. This story, translated by Emily Jin, revolves around a Nigerian video producer who is recruited to make an undetectable deepfake. Touching on impending breakthroughs in computer vision, biometrics, and AI security, it imagines a future world marked by cat-and-mouse games between deepfakers and detectors, and between defenders and perpetrators. As the light-rail train inched into Yaba station, Amaka pushed a button next to the door of his carriage. Even before the train came to a complete stop, the doors opened with a whoosh and Amaka hopped off.

Lee's technical explanations sit alongside Chen's fictional short stories to produce an exploration of the perils and possibilities of AI. This story revolves around a Nigerian video producer who is recruited to make an undetectable deepfake. Touching on impending breakthroughs in computer vision, biometrics, and AI security, it imagines a future world marked by cat-and-mouse games between deepfakers and detectors, and between defenders and perpetrators. As the light-rail train inched into Yaba station, Amaka pushed a button next to the door of his carriage. Even before the train came to a complete stop, the doors opened with a whoosh and Amaka hopped off.

In fog-assisted IoT systems, it is a common practice to offload tasks from IoT devices to their nearby fog nodes to reduce task processing latencies and energy consumptions. However, the design of online energy-efficient scheme is still an open problem because of various uncertainties in system dynamics such as processing capacities and transmission rates. Moreover, the decision-making process is constrained by resource limits on fog nodes and IoT devices, making the design even more complicated. In this paper, we formulate such a task offloading problem with unknown system dynamics as a combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem with long-term constraints on time-averaged energy consumptions. Through an effective integration of online learning and online control, we propose a \textit{Learning-Aided Green Offloading} (LAGO) scheme. In LAGO, we employ bandit learning methods to handle the exploitation-exploration tradeoff and utilize virtual queue techniques to deal with the long-term constraints. Our theoretical analysis shows that LAGO can reduce the average task latency with a tunable sublinear regret bound over a finite time horizon and satisfy the long-term time-averaged energy constraints. We conduct extensive simulations to verify such theoretical results.

Custodian Investment Plc – leading insurance company in Nigeria – has launched Nigeria's first ever Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot in the insurance sector, leveraging technology to deploy enhanced personalized services to its customers. Max is available to interact with customers 24/7 via three platforms; Facebook messenger, Telegram and Web messenger. On Telegram, simply search for'Custodian Max', to chat with Max. Max was officially launched on Thursday 21st June, 2018. In the words of Mr. Oladele Akinsanya, Head of Service Delivery, Custodian Investment PLC, "Customer service is at the heart of what we do at Custodian. This is why we are happy to introduce Max to Nigerians. Max is a tool that enables the customer to drive insurance, based on convenience. "Max is just like a relationship officer that is readily available at your beck and call; anytime of the day and from any country in the world!

Google plans to open an artificial-intelligence research center in Accra, Ghana, the latest in a string of investments the tech company has made in Africa. The research center will focus on using AI in areas such as healthcare, agriculture and education, Google said. "We're committed to collaborating with local universities and research centers, as well as working with policy makers on the potential uses of AI in Africa," t he company In a blog post on Wednesday. The new AI center in Ghana will open later this year and include machine learning researchers and engineers, Google said, thought it did provide details on the number of staff it will hire. Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised last year during a visit to Lagos that Google would continue raising its profile on the continent.