ICTworks

I created a short presentation showcasing 18 different ways international development organizations are using artificial intelligence to improve outcomes in health, education, agriculture, economic development and humanitarian relief today. These are practical real-world examples, not just ideas or concepts. You can implement them now.

Watch Video on YouTube – View Slides on Google Drive

15 Uses of AI Highlighted in the Video

Not everyone wants to watch a video, even if it took me several hours to make it. Below you’ll find a selection of AI solutions I highlight in the video, with links to their websites. Please investigate how to use the AI solutions that are relevant to your efforts and contact me now if you want to design AI solutions for your development problems.

Global Health

We can use computer vision and pattern recognition to view blood samples to detect a variety of diseases. Back in 2016, XRapid launched an automated diagnostic test on smartphones for malaria that was 98% accurate – much better and faster than human reviews. While this app seems to have died, computer vision and pattern recognition works on any visual or auditory data.

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A company in India is evaluating malnutrition in infants using smartphone photos of babies placed next to a standard measurement reference. There are also several efforts to diagnose cardiovascular diseases using coughs and other human generated sounds that are now mainstream. For example, Hyfe AI is a commercial product available to consumers that can reveal health issues like pneumonia, asthma, and tuberculosis.

Wadhwaniai AI in India is using pattern recognition of cough sounds to diagnose TB patients in poor and rural areas. Even better, they recognized that diagnosing TB is just the first step in the long process of curing someone of TB. Patients can avoid treatment, creating drug-resistant TB – which is even worse than normal TB. Wadhwaniai is using AI to predict which patients will be lost to follow up visits, and then proactively engaging with them to increase treatment adherence.

Humanitarian Assistance

Google Flood Hub is using geographic information systems and predictive analytics to understand flood risk, which kills tens of thousands of people per year and causes 4.7 billion in damages per flood in the US alone. In 1999, floods killed 37,000 people worldwide, and in 2019 alone, the US experienced $20 billion in flood damages.

In Syria, Hala Systems developed a system to detect aircraft and then predict their route, giving advanced warning to civilians of airborne attacks. This early warning system saves lives now, in a man-made humanitarian disaster area.

Climate and Environment

Humans are also causing massive deforestation disasters worldwide. Rainforest Connection is using sensitive microphones, mobile telephone networks, AI, and solar power to identify the sounds of illegal logging in protected areas. The forest rangers can identify where and what is threatening our environment and act to protect it. You can even listen in on the Rainforest Connect mobile app to add a human dimension to their technological advancement.

Now here is one of the coolest uses of AI. The Earth Species Project realized that of the millions of life forms on this planet, we humans can only speak to one – other humans. They are using generative AI to create trans-species communications – ways we can talk to wild animals like birds and whales, and even one day – our two best friends, dogs and cats.

Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment

In international development, we can prioritize gender equality and women’s empowerment through increasing digital literacy – the usage of online tools that are needed for success in 2024. Women have often had limited educational opportunities for digital literacy and international languages like English.

Autocorrect and autocomplete are two AI automation technologies that seem to be normal, we forget they are true AI innovations that can greatly improve written text, especially for those who are learning English later in life. We can also use generative AI to improve their business proposals. Services like Grant Assistant can help women write better proposals, democratizing access to government procurement and foundation support.

Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance

We need to be concerned about election violence in many countries, sadly, including my own. Several researchers found that they could convert written text into data for sentiment analysis that can predict if influential actors were promoting violence. In a stunning discovery, they reached 85% accuracy in predicting Kenyan election violence 50-150 days in advance. Enough time, one would hope, to reduce or eliminate that violence.

Economic Growth and Trade

AI can now instantly translate between a host of languages thanks to pattern recognition tools like Google Translate or Wordly. The latter offers real-time verbal translation services via AI, for conferences and meetings. Google and Apple now have tools that can translate text on documents in real time – an awesome solution for cross-language business transactions. I used these tools recently when traveling through Hungary and Slovakia, where written text – from street signs to menus – were written in a language I could not understand.

Here is something everyone watching this video can understand – we need electrical power to thrive in the online world. Husk is using AI to understand both renewable power supplies and consumer demand, and matching both, better with mini-electrical grids. Clouds passing over solar panels reduce power generation and if it’s harvest season, power demand can spike when processing crops. Using machine learning and automated adaptation, Husk is able to generate extremely low-cost power in rural areas.

Agriculture and Food Security

Plantix is using pattern recognition on plant and pest photos to detect pests and recommend control techniques. They can also see patterns across farms and regions to predict mobile pest outbreaks like Fall Army Worm. EO Data Science practices another form of prediction with Paddy Watch – calculating rice crops yields one month into the growing seasons. Many crop types can be predicted, and rice is one of the most cultivated grains, making predicting its growth and yield to be key to food security and even national security for rice importing countries.

Education

Natural language processing and communications tools like WhatsApp combining to be amazing, personalized tutors. Rori is a maths tutor from India that is seeing statistically significant increases in learning outcomes for less than 10 dollars per child per year. Also, maths are one of the few subjects that translate across languages – 2+2 is 4 world wide.

Educating differently able people, especially those with difficulty communicating in any language, is a serious translation challenge. Livox is using AI to present language cues to a person based on their context and previous discussions. It then builds on those cues in follow-on conversations, easing their communication burden and improving their lives.