“Participatory Research For Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study In African Languages” has emerged winner of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year 2021.
The award was presented by Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation.
The 18-page research work published in November 2020 (publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics) was undertaken by a total of 47 authors and the Masakhane community with about 18 Nigerians directly involved.
Stellamaris Onyegbule has been awarded the Most Innovative Optometry Student in Nigeria at the inaugural Damian Echendu award.
The award seeks to reward, encourage innovation and creativity among optometry students in the country by supporting solution-driven innovations relevant to the practice of optometry.
Stellamaris Onyegbule, a student of the Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO) received the award for her “Optoblink Innovation”, which is a spectacle mounted device, helps patients with dry eye due to computer vision syndrome.
Team Foris Labs has been named winner of the Stanford Center on Longevity 2020-2021 Design Challenge competition receiving $10,000 prize after defeating 222 other entries from 37 countries over the course of the competition.
The Foris Labs team comprised of John Onuigbo from Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Nigeria (COOU) and Kyrian Obikwelu from Federal University of Technology Owerri, Nigeria (FUTO).
The team experienced the difficulty of trying to learn science lab skills while online schooling with poor internet connectivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. They presented their design for an offline platform that simulates a science lab for high school students, in which they can perform individual or group experiments.
New Horizons System Solutions Limited (Nigeria) and one of its staff member, Patrick Asamago have won the 2020 EC-Council Circle of Excellence Awards.
Saadat Aliyu has developed Helpio App, an android application used for reporting cases of sexual abuse.
Founded in 2020, Helpio App is available on Google play store. It is also available in two languages, Hausa and English languages.
Continue reading Saadat Aliyu Develops Helpio App For Reporting Rape Cases
Professor Ibiyinka Fuwape of Physics Department, Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) has emerged one of the winners of African Union Kwame Nkrumah Regional Award for Scientific Excellence (AUKNASE) 2020.
Ubuntu Hub comprising Patrick Ocheja, Regina Ochonu, Grace Kagho and Panji Gemilang from Asia has won the Japan Hackathon 2021 on February 7, 2021.
The first place team presented an idea called Ubuntu Hub, which would help to give offline access to online education in a near real-time manner. There is an increasing number of edtech solutions that help people learn online in Africa. However, the number of people that have access to broadband in rural communities is still low.
The team hopes its idea will, in due time, help users access online educational content without necessarily requiring a connection to the internet.
The project is not designed to replace the internet, instead, it will bring the internet to underserved/unconnected regions and people.