A Turkey-based Nigerian data scientist, Leonardo Iheme, has won SAS Hackathon 2023 award for his Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution to the Turkey earthquake where about 50,000 people lost their lives and hundreds of thousands were injured in February.
Iheme (Nigerian), James Swinnerton (UK-based) and Can Tosun
all from EPAM System had entered the competition and won in two categories –the
natural language and the regional awards (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
The February devastating earthquake in the Republic of
Türkiye put the country in disarray. One of the problems faced by aid givers
was inability to pinpoint the areas that needed the most help. Tweets and
hashtags were popping up from different parts of the country that went viral.
Leonardo, popularly known as Leo, said: “When people tweet
about the number of people who need help in a particular area, we could
aggregate those tweets but there was no infrastructure in place to aggregate
those tweets.
“That was when we saw the opportunity and decided to use
natural language processing to gather all these from Twitter, convert them into
addresses, convert these addresses into geolocation through longitude and
latitude.
“Natural Language processing helped a lot in processing
these tweets. With these locations that were converted, we were able to get
satellite images and we could compare ‘before and after’ the images for
confirmation of the quake. For example, saying that there used to be 50
buildings here and now there are only 30 of them now because of the earthquake.
We were able to gather such data and this really helped the aid workers to
prioritise the most distressed scenes. That was compelling enough for the
judges of the panel,” he said.
Leonardo and his team had won a Turkish national award for
developing an AI to detect tumours in breast cancer. The government organised
the competition on using AI to solve health-related problems. “It’s my passion
as well, so I led a team to win this AI Competition for health,” he said.
“We had a couple of the organisers shared ultrasound images
– some with tumours and others without tumours and the goal is to accurately
detect the tumours because that would help the doctors to localise it, that’s
the challenge the radiologists have. Sometimes, they look at these images but
can’t make decisions because they can’t see the tumour and if there is a
tumour, how big it is. And this is where AI can really assist them.
“We entered this competition and we emerged the winner. I
was particularly proud of that because I led the data scientists there. We
emerged the winner at that big event where the President of Turkey was in
attendance and greeted us,” he said.
Iheme was born and raised in Bauchi. His father, Dr. Andee
Iheme, a retired public relations expert is from Imo State and his mother, Mrs
Moji Iheme, a university lecturer is from Kogi.