Pan-African company, Ixio Analytics plans to launch a central platform, called Zindi, where the African data science community can convene and collaborate to solve real business problems.
Ixio Analytics is a data-led modelling and analytics company that serves clients across the African region, with offices in South Africa and Ghana.
Megan Yates, chief scientist at Ixio Analytics, says Zindi will provide a platform where a community of mostly African data scientists can collectively solve the continent's most pressing challenges.
"How it works is that Zindi will work with organisations, be it corporates, start-ups, non-profits or governments, to define their business problems, prepare and source the datasets, and post the [business problem as a] competition for the Zindi community to solve."
Yates adds that data scientists will then download the datasets to build machine learning and artificial intelligence models. "Competitions are open for two to four months. Upon submission, solutions are automatically evaluated by the platform based on accuracy, and data scientists can see their ranking on a live public leader board.
"By hosting a competition on the platform, we afford organisations an opportunity to quickly and affordably source the best data science solutions and talent," says Yates.
The platform will be officially launched at the AI Expo Africa, taking place from 9 to 11 September at the Century City Conference Centre, in Cape Town.
As part of the launch, there will be a set of inaugural competitions that tackle challenges such as optimising public transportation in Nairobi, automatically processing text in documents to classify them according to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals framework, and maximising the impact of social media posts.
Notes Yates: "The total prize money up for grabs with this first set of competitions is expected to be at least $20 000, with new competitions continuing to roll out every month."
Data scientists in demand
There has been a high demand for data scientists locally in recent years, with analyst firm Gartner saying the need for data scientists is growing at about three times the rate for statisticians and business intelligence analysts.
According to Professor Riaan de Jongh, director of the Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics at North West University, the country needs to produce a lot more data scientists and analysts. "For every 66 data science jobs available, we have 33 data scientists, so we need to put a high focus on producing more skilled analysts."
Companies such as BCX have been trying to fill the data science skills gap, through the establishment of the Explore Data Science Academy (EDSA). To date, the company has invested R50 million into the academy.
Daniel Mutonga, sales executive of Mobiticket, one of Zindi's inaugural competition hosts, says the platform is a good way for novice scientists to sharpen their skills on real-world problems. "As a start-up looking to digitise the transport sector through online/mobile bookings and cashless payments, our data is growing exponentially. We don't have the resources to spend on expensive data science consultants. Zindi allows us to crowdsource a custom-built machine learning solution for our business and identify local data science talent."
Data scientists can register on the Zindi platform here.
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