EDGE COMPUTING IN ETHIOPIA- A QUEST FOR AI SOLUTION

It was one year ago in a random conversation that a friend mentioned hardware very excited. At that point, I never imagined how that conversation has the potential to impact my life. My name is Natnael Kebede- Co-founder and Chief NERD at New Era research and Development Center. The piece of hardware was the jetson nano. I went over to my house to start researching about the jetson nano that night. From that point onward, I could not stop following up and researching the NVIDIA edge computing concept. This is a story about how a single conversation helped me build a career and a community around an idea.

The conversation we had with my friend was about edge computing disrupting the new AI development environment. For a country like Ethiopia, AI has been usually considered a luxury than a necessity. This was due to the perception of universities, investors, startups, and the Government about AI. All of them think about expensive high-performance computers and the lack of experienced professionals in the field. I realized how the edge computing solution could be a peaceful weapon to change the attitude towards AI in Ethiopia. My and partner decided to have the jetson Nano and put our name on the Map.

The learning process was much easier and efficient when we started experimenting with the jetson hands-on. It was by the time coincidently we were invited to the first Ethiopian AI summit to showcase any project related to AI. We decided to go for building an edge solution. Our research team's side of the problem was to build a system that reads a streaming video and uses the jetson to identify any desired inference at the edge. The application could range from counting cars in a connected traffic junction and detecting license plates to agricultural solutions, where any flying or ground vehicle feeding a video of a farm to detect plantation health issues / counting fruits. We started off with the traffic management system. We organized a team of three engineering interns and myself to build a prototype in less than 8 weeks.

We got the whole thing figured out after going through a lot of reading. Finding answers was not the easiest thing as it was rare to find publications on the jetson nano. , a friend gave our contact to one of the Nvidia emerging chapter program lead, and we had a conversation about the emerging chapter program. It was the best timing. Although we wish we had known about the emerging chapter's program earlier to access the DLI courses, we kept going with a hope for future projects the emerging chapters program will enable our community with a hands-on experience and technical capability. The project was finally presented at the summit and we had the chance to pitch the idea of edge computing to the prime minister of Ethiopia his excellency Abiy Ahmed (Dr). We got promising feedback from him working towards taking the project towards implementation in the years to come.

After the summit, we knew we need more talent to recruit and inspire. We launched a short-term training on the jetson nano. It took our team eight weeks to build the traffic management system. We made sure our training takes the same duration of time for the students to build a final project at the end. We value open sourcing projects. The output from these training projects is to be open source so we can build our community bigger. Since we got limited resources, we only provide 25 students in three groups. Currently, we registered 13 students and the first batch is taking the training. We are using the free DLI courses we were granted part of the emerging chapter program as guidelines for our curriculum. We will soon provide them with free course vouchers after filtering consistent training participants.

Our goal is to create a community of enthusiasts, hobbyist, engineers, and developers passionate about edge computing solutions in Agriculture and Smart city projects. We do this by consistently engaging with the tech community in Addis Ababa. We organized an open seminar last week, we showcased our projects and also preached about edge computing.?We were able to inspire more students for our program. Our team members are all enjoying the free courses. We will be coming up with something bigger very soon. I want to personally thank the emerging chapter's program for all the support and resources. On behalf of our team, we are grateful to be part of the emerging chapter's program. Very soon we would love to present our work to other partners.

To learn more about NERD?- https://www.instagram.com/nerds_center/

Find our project @ https://github.com/Natnael-k/AI-based-Traffic-Control-System--