Ghanaian Data Scientist, Franklin Koomson Adjei has been declared runner up at the just ended 2021 Global Better Working World Data science challenge.
The event which was organized by Ernst & Young (EY) global ended on 21st July 2021.
Franklin, who is also a Junior Associate at AmaliTech Services participated in the first challenge with his colleague, Cyndy Amesawu. The two graduates of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology were the only finalists from Africa
Over 8,500 students and young professionals from more than 115 countries took part in the Challenge.
Their task?
To develop an automated fire-edge detection and prediction model to help firefighters make more timely and informed decisions, and ultimately helping to save lives, property and biodiversity from the effects of wildfires.
During the first challenge, participants were charged to build an image segmentation model to detect fire edges. They were further required to use the answers (images) from this model in challenge two’s model to predict the intensity and direction of the spread of the fire.
This sort is referred to as a next-frame prediction model. The combination of models from both challenges can be used to warn people living in areas of cross-fires ahead of time to prevent casualties.
One of the judges, Professor David Shmoys, the Director for the Centre for Data Science For Enterprise and Society at Cornell University was full of praise for Franklin’s work.
“He was just technically a very strong contribution. The extent to which he used multi-scale discriminators that he incorporators is really a state of the art technology and doing this pushed him to really be in it,” he said.
Dan Morris, a Principal Scientist with the AI for Earth at Microsoft was positive this innovation would be useful in the real world.
Better Working World Data challenge is an annual event. Check the EY website for details of the next challenge.
Watch the full awards event here: