HelpMum Selected for Google AI for Social Good Program’s 2021/2022 Cohort
HelpMum, a social enterprise on a mission to reduce maternal and infant mortality in Nigeria has been selected for the Google AI for Social Good program’s 2021/2022 cohort.
Founded in 2017 by Dr Adereni Abiodun, HelpMum uses mobile technology and low-cost birth kits to tackle maternal and infant mortality. The startup provides clean birth kits to ensure that any pregnant woman is given the best possible care during delivery.
HelpMum will partner with Vanderbilt University Research Scientist, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, to develop a new solution to aid the need for essential resources such as vaccines and care through utilizing a data-driven approach and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Google AI for Social Good collaborates with Google.org and Google University Relations initiative, to help connect academics and nonprofits to develop AI techniques that will improve the lives of people, especially in underserved communities that have not yet benefited from the advances in AI.
According to the official statement, Google will provide the awardees and the projects with funding, technical contribution and access to computational resources.
“During the application process, Googlers arranged workshops involving more than 150 teams to discuss potential projects. Following the workshop meetings, project teams made up of NGOs and academics submitted proposals that Google experts reviewed.
The result is a promising range of projects spanning seventeen countries across Asia-Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa — including India, Uganda, Nigeria, Japan and Australia— focused on agriculture, conservation and public health.”
Projects were selected based on three research categories – Agriculture, Conservation and Public Health.
See below for a list of awardees from Africa:
Agriculture:
* Incentive Engineering and Truthful Mechanisms for Grassland Quality and Local Market Price Estimation in Africa w/Long Tran-Thanh (University of Warwick) and AfriScout (Kenya).
* Adoption of smartphone agro-applications for field-based disease diagnosis and real-time feedback for smallholder farmers w/ Godliver Owomugisha (Busitema University) and Papoli Community Development Foundation (Uganda).
* Towards Achieving Better Market Access for Smallholder Farmers w/Daphney-Stavroula Zois (University at Albany, SUNY) and AGRI-WEB (Ghana).
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Conservation:
* AI for Animal Census w/Trevor Darrell (UC Berkeley) and Wildlife Conservation Society (Nigeria).
* Applying AI to Data Challenges in Wildlife Conservation w/Nataliya Tkachenko (University of Oxford) and Panthera (Nepal, India, Malaysia, Senegal).
* Human-in-the-loop Chimpanzee Identification w/Gianluca Demartini (University of Queensland) and Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea).
* Human-in-the-Loop Labelling System for Elephant Identification and Tracking w/Ashwin Srinivasan (BITS Pilani, Goa Campus) and Mara Elephant Project (Kenya).
* Using Machine Learning to Predict Deforestation w/Andrew Katumba and Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende (Makerere University) and Moja Global (Uganda).
Public Health:
* Augmenting Community Health Workers Efficacy using AI w/Himabindu Lakkaraju (Harvard University) and Living Goods (Kenya, Uganda).
* Data-driven Vaccine Demand Forecasting and Health Interventions in Nigeria w/Ayan Mukhopadhyay (Vanderbilt University) HelpMum (Nigeria).
* Incentive Design for Better Health Coverage w/ Arunesh Sinha (Singapore Management University) and D-tree (Zanzibar).
* Leave No One Behind: Spatial AI-Enabled Settlement Mapping to Enhance WASH Access for Vulnerable Populations w/ Yiqun Xie (University of Maryland, College Park) and Aquaya Institute (Kenya).
* Predicting early exit from the m2m health program w/ Toby Walsh, Yang Song (UNSW Sydney) and Mothers2Mothers (South Africa).
* Using AI to Prevent the Risk of Maternal and Neonatal Deaths in Kenya w/Amulya Yadav (Penn State University) and Jacaranda Health (Kenya).
View the full list of projects here.