Darlington Ahiale Akogo Founder, MinoHealth, Ghana
Darlington Ahiale Akogo is the Founder and Director of Artificial Intelligence at GUDRA, and its subsidiaries; minoHealth; an AI Healthtech company, minoHealth AI Labs; an AI Healthcare, Biotech and Biomedical Research Lab, karaAgro AI; an AI-powered Plant & Pest Disease Detection and Precision Agriculture platform, Runmila AI Institute; an AI and Data Science training institute, and Gudra AI Studio; an organisation broadly exploring AI and Exponential Technologies applied various domains including Transportation, Sanitation and Energy. He's also an Advisory Board Member and Ambassador to West Africa at AI Expo Africa, the largest business focused AI community in Africa, with its Head Quarters in South Africa.
He's a member of United Nations ITU and World Health Organization's Focus Group on 'Artificial Intelligence for Health' (AI4H), and a member of MIT Tech Review Global Panel. And he's a member of World Economic Forum's Global Shapers Ho Hub.
Darlington Ahiale Akogo is also an Artificial Intelligence advocate, communicator and mentor. He believes Artificial Intelligence can solve a lot of problems plaguing Africa and being proactive is necessary in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and the 4th Industrial Revolution. So Darlington advocates, teaches and communicates Artificial Intelligence through seminars, lectures, interviews, writings and mentorships. He was a research presenter at NeurIPS 2018, the largest Conference on Artificial Intelligence in the World. And he was one of the speakers at the AI Expo Africa 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa and Next Einstein Forum’s Africa Science Week. He was also a participant in Massachusett Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Global Community BioSummit 2018. His research paper ‘ScaffoldNet: Detecting and Classifying Biomedical Polymer-Based Scaffolds via a Convolutional Neural Network’ was part of the Future of Information and Communications Conference, which is sponsored by IEEE and featured in the book, ‘Advances in Information and Communication’. Alongside great minds including Yoshua Bengio, who's celebrated as one of the Fathers of Deep Learning, Darlington is featured in and wrote for the book, "Artificial Intelligence Simplified: 99 Use Cases And Expert Thoughts For Starters" which was put together by Data Science Nigeria. He also writes reports and essays for Synapse Magazine - ‘The Voice of African Artificial Intelligence & Data Science’ by AI Media, and he writes articles for MIT Tech Review Insights." |
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Mayassa Salum AllyDIrector-General, Zanzibar Health Research Institute, TanzaniaDr.Mayassa S.Ally, (B.pharm, Ms.Pharm,PHD pharm),a lady born 1973, is a scientist specialized in toxicology and innovation of new drugs in the herbal medicines. She has been working in the Ministry of health Zanzibar since 2005 that was soon after finished her bachelor and Master’s degree in pharmacy from St. Petersburg chemical - pharmaceutical academy in Russia (1997-2004) .In 2009 appointed to be the Ag. Chief Government Chemist of Zanzibar. She has been a tutor at Mbweni College of Health Science (2006-2014), teaching different pharmaceutical subjects. In 2011 she was appointed to be the first Director general of Zanzibar - Central Medical stores ( Presidential appointee).Due to her great interest in research issues she decided to go for further studies ( 2014-2017) in Tianjin university of traditional Chinese medicine in China, for her PHD Studies. Currently is working as Director General in Zanzibar Health Research Institute (ZAHRI), (Presidential appointee 2018) and she is recently continuing with her research in herbal medicinal plants of Zanzibar in the aim of searching and innovating the new medicines. She is living with her family, husband and 4 children in Zanzibar Municipality. |
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 Gibson Kibiki
Executive Secretary and CEO, East African Health Research Commission, BurundI
Prof Dr Gibson Kibiki, MD, MMed, PhD is the Founding Executive Secretary of the East African Health Research Commission (EAHRC) of the East African Community (EAC) www.eac.int. EAHRC is established as a mechanism for providing evidence-based advice to the EAC upon all matters of health and health-related research. It guides the EAC on knowledge generation, technological development, policy formulation, practice, and other health related matters. Prof Kibiki provides leadership and guidance in the realisation and implementation of the vision, mission, goals, and objectives of the EAHRC. At EAC, he conceptualised and led the establishment of the Digital Regional East African Community Health (Digital REACH) Initiative. Digital REACH is novel, and ground-breaking regional initiative that aims at scaling uptake and utilisation of digital technology for improvement of healthcare service delivery and health outcomes across the six EAC countries. He is currently leading the implementation of the Initiative. The Initiative was approved for implementation by the EAC council of ministers of health, and endorsed by the presidents of the EAC countries.
For the past two decades prior to his current position, Kibiki who is a professor of medicine served as an academician, a clinician, a research scientist, and a leader in the health sector. He has academic positions in Africa, North America, and Europe. |
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 Naomi Lee
FG-AI4H Vice-Chair; Executive Director (Digital), The Lancet, United Kingdom
Naomi Lee is the Executive Editor (Digital) at the leading medical journal The Lancet. Naomi handles peer review and commissioning in her specialist areas of surgery, digital medicine/AI, and medical technology. As part of the marketing and communications team, she is also leading the digital transformation of The Lancet group. Naomi trained in surgery, specialising in urology and has worked in the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico. She studied medicine at Cambridge University and King’s College London, and data science at University College London. Naomi joined The Lancet in 2014.
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Nada MalouAntibiotic Resistance Diagnostic and Surveillance Advisor, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), France
Dr Nada Malou: PhD in Microbiology. After a political science master, she started working with Medecins Sans Frontieres in the field as laboratory specialists. She implemented several MSF microbiology laboratories in Mali, Jordan, Yemen, Liberia, Central Africa Republic. She also assessed different local microbiology laboratories and signed a support collaboration with local laboratories in Iraq, Gaza, Pakistan, Lebanon. Today she is working in MSF HQ in Paris where she supports the implementation of microbiology laboratories, the identification of new diagnostic tools and implementation of antimicrobial surveillance system. After few years of experiences, she launched with MSF foundation the ASTapp projects that has as objective to develop an offline mobile application that can analyzes and interprets antimicrobial susceptibility tests in order to ensure accurate diagnostic and treatment of patients. |
I rene Masanja
Senior Scientist, Ifakara Health Institute, Tanzania
Dr Irene Masanja is a senior scientist at Ifakara Health Institute, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Basel and a wealth of experience in medical research with special interest in implementation and health systems research. Dr Irene led implementation studies on use of malaria rapid tests and Artesunate injection before adopted as treatment policies in Tanzania. On various periods, Dr Irene served as a Technical Advisor for Field Epidemiology training, and M&E at the Ministry of Health. Currently Dr Irene is a co-investigator in the DYNAMIC study that aims to use Machine Learning to enrich electronic clinical algorithms for management of illness in Children. Irene also serves as a national master trainer on malaria diagnosis and treatment, give lectures and supervise Master’s (Public Health) students at the University of Dar es Salaam and Nelson Mandela. |
Justina Mashiba
Acting Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board, Universal Communication Service Access Fund (UCSAF), Tanzania
Justina Tumaini Mashiba is the Lawyer by professional and she is now the Acting Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Universal Communication Service Access Fund (UCSAF). She has built his career in Legal, Management and ICT for over a decade Internationally, Justina has been involved in the work of International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the past 7 years contributing in the work of Study Group 1. She is now serving as Vice Rapporteur of Question 5 of Study Group 5.
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 Rose Nakasi
PhD Researcher at the AI LAB in Makerere University, Uganda
Rose Nakasi is a PhD Candidate of Computer Science at Makerere University in Uganda as well as a Lecturer of Computer Science in Busitema University, Uganda. Her research interests are in Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence and particularly in the use of these for developing improved automated tools and techniques for microscopy diagnosis and prediction of diseases like Malaria for low resourced but highly endemic Countries.
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Dorah Peter Ndazi
Project Manager at Index Labs TZ Company Limited, Tanzania
Dorah Peter Ndazi is a Project Manager at Index Labs TZ Company Limited (indexlabs.co.tz). She is a Project Manager who collaborates with CEOs, executives and social entrepreneurs to create awareness using tech innovation on various social challenges facing their surrounding communities. After spending more than four years in teaching and tutoring ICT in various organizations, Dorah knows how to bring people to talk openly, freely and what truly drives conversations in order to understand how well you connect with the people you’re trying to help and communicate your understanding back to them. In addition to her extensive teaching experience, Dorah is a social volunteer at various ICT workshops and trainings. She has volunteered in various events as a presenter in programs that concerns challenges for albino, teenage girls and schoolgirls. She was honored with the certificate of effective participation for her contributions to ICT seminars and workshops at Kampala International University and Raleigh Tanzania as a Youth Enterprise Health Incubation participant. Her professional interests focus on social entrepreneurship in Tanzania and her current project is a Social Impact Health ChatBot named eShangazi that focuses on educating youths and their surrounding community on matters regarding Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) that champions for SDG 3 of Health and Well Being. Other projects include a Gender Based Violence ChatBot (SDG 5), a Water and Sanitation Chatbot (SDG 6) and a Legal Rights Chatbot (SDG 16) and other tech-related and social impact projects. Dorah has also participated in other social impact societies such as the JALI project that aimed at keeping young girls in school, a project that was under TAI Tanzania. She has also participated in the SASA BASI Campaign that advocates for the eradication of teenage pregnancies, a project under the care of Sahara Ventures. Dorah has made a few media outreach programs to promote eShangazi ChatBot at various broadcast outlets such as Clouds 360 TV show, Clouds Power Breakfast radio show, Clouds Sunday radio show and the eShangazi project was featured in esteemed newspapers such as Mwananchi Newspaper and The Guardian. She has also put eShangazi on the world map out there through a feature story that our startup, Index Labs did with BBC Swahili (Nairobi Main Office) back in January 2019. Apart from that, Dorah has been a guest speaker at various ICT/Innovation gatherings such as launch of AMUA 2.0 organized by UNFPA Tanzania and Sahara Venture early April 2019, the MUHAS symposium debate on 24thApril 2019, the UNICEF ESARO annual gathering in June 2019 and the National commemorations for International Youth Day in Dodoma, Tanzania in mid-August 2019. Dorah Peter Ndazi holds a first class honors Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems (Bsc.MIS) from Kampala International University-Dar es Salaam Campus and is currently pursuing her Master Degree in Information Systems Management (Msc.ISM) at UDSM – CoICT Kijitonyama. |
 Elaine Nsoesie
Assistant Professor of Global Health, Boston University, USA
Dr. Nsoesie is an Assistant Professor of Global Health at Boston University (BU). She is also a BU Data Science Faculty Fellow and a Data and Innovation Fellow at The Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) in the Office of the President in Sierra Leone. Dr. Nsoesie applies data science methodologies to global health problems, using digital data and technology to improve health, particularly in the realm of surveillance of chronic and infectious diseases. She completed her PhD in Computational Epidemiology from the Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program at Virginia Tech. She also have an MS in Statistics and a BS in Mathematics. Dr. Nsoesie was born and raised in Cameroon. |
Peng Liang
Vice Chair of FG-AI4H WG-Regulatory; Director of CMDE, National Medical Products Administration, China
Dr. Peng Liang, Research Associate Professor, is the deputy director of Division I of Center for Medical Device Evaluation(CMDE), China National Medical Products Administration(NMPA). He is also a medical device National Inspector in NMPA. He received his Ph.d, MS and BS degree in biomedical engineering from Tsinghua University. He focuses on information technology and robotics in medical devices, and is the author of Chinese medical device guidances on software, cybersecurity and mobile application. He is writing the Chinese guidance on artificial intelligence medical devices now. He was the member of the Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) working group of International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF), and is the member of the Medical Device Cybersecurity working group of IMDRF, and the standardization committee of Chinese Society of Biomedical Engineering(CSBME). |
Sameer Pujari
FG-AI4H Vice-Chair, WHO
Currently with WHO, he is helping manage the mHEALTH for NCDs as part of the secretariat for the flagship WHO and ITU joint program on mHealth for Non-Communicable Diseases; Be He@lthy Be Mobile which was awarded the WHO DGs Excellence Award this year. With WHO since 2008, he has also provided technical advise and support to over 50 countries in the development of surveillance and management information systems. He is also a core member of the Health Data Forum at WHO and the co-chair of the WHO mHEALTH working group. Before coming to WHO, he worked with the US Governments health agency helping various countries build informatics systems for immunization and vaccination programs in Asia Europe and Africa. He started his career working with WHO's National Polio Surveillance Project in India for 7 years, where he led the development and implementation of various information management systems for surveillance across the country. He holds bachelor degrees in business and software engineering and a master's degree with a gold medal in management, he also has an earned fellowship in public health informatics from the US government health and human services. |
 Ally Salim Jr
Founder & CEO, Inspired Ideas, Tanzania
Ally Salim Jr. is a software engineer and the CEO/Founder of Inspired Ideas. He is passionate about empowering others through teaching and mentoring and appreciates home-grown solutions for the African continent. Ally’s main interest is in using machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve African challenges in health and industrialization. He is the creator of Dr. Elsa, a smart health platform that uses AI to better assess patient conditions in rural areas, detect early cervical cancer using blood test results, and better connect patients to healthcare services through their mobile phones. He is also the Lead Developer of Mary, a soon-to-be-released AI toolkit that puts Africa first by building context-aware, intelligent technologies. |
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 Manjula Singh
Deputy Director General, Division of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi, India
Dr. Manjula Singh, is Deputy Director General, Division of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases, at Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi, India. She is a Medical Doctor (MBBS) with post graduate DNB training in Dermatology, Venereology and Leprosy and Ph.D in ‘Immunology’.
She has a vast experience of more than 18 years in the area of Tuberculosis, leprosy & HIV research and has been involved in conducting many clinical trials. She is the Programme Officer for research in Mycobacterial diseases at ICMR including Indo-US collaboration on tuberculosis research and is the co-ordinator of several clinical and implementation research studies on TB, leprosy.
She is a member of National Technical Resource Group of RNTCP, Central TB Division, under Ministry of Health & family Welfare, Government of India. She is also a member of WHO’s Global TB Research Task Force. She is the coordinator of TB research activities of the ‘BRICS TB Research Network’ and is involved in planning and coordinating multicountry research activities among BRICS countries.
She is the nodal person involved in the establishment and co-ordination of ‘India TB Research consortium’, a flagship programme of ICMR focussing on development of new tools to tackle TB in a mission mode which has won the prestigious International ‘KOCHON Prize’ 2017 for accelerating TB T&D in the country. She was also the coordinator of the multicentric research of mobile TB diagnostics van intervention in tribal areas in 5 states of India which won the ‘BMJ infectious disease initiative of the year in 2018’. She is also the recipient of National e-Governance award, 2019 by Ministry of Public Reforms & Public Grievances, Government of India for Outstanding research on citizen centric services by research Institutions for the project on tribal TB in the country.
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Peter Ulanga
Retired Chief Executive Officer and retired member of the Board of Universal Communication Service Access Fund (UCSAF)
Eng. Peter Ulanga is a retired Chief Executive Officer and retired member of the Board of Universal Communication Service Access Fund (UCSAF). He has built his career in management and ICT leadership for the over two decades. Internationally, Engineer Ulanga has been involved in the work of International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the past 19 years contributing in the work of Study Group 2, Study Group 13 and Study Group 5. He has also made many presentations in various international conferences on ICT. Engineer Ulanga in his spare time does software development in Java/Android and iOS Swift, with research interests in IMT2020, Network 2030 and IoT, he is following up technological developments in the Standardization space worldwide mainly through International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and IEEE. He is currently a vice chairman of Focus Group on Environmental Efficiency for Artificial Intelligence and other Emerging Technologies (FG-AI4EE). |
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 William Wasswa
Head of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Department/Assistant Lecturer, Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), Uganda
Mr. Wasswa William (30 years) is a lecturer at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), Uganda. He is the head of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering. He has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering (software Engineering) and a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Mbarara University of Science and Technology supported by the African Development Bank and a PhD split site at the University of Strathclyde, UK supported by the Commonwealth Commission. He has developed a digital pathology platform dubbed PapES (Pap Smear Expert System) for automated diagnosis and classification of cervical cancer from pap-smear images. He is much interested in digital health innovations that provide universal health coverage, especially reaching the unreached particularly in LMIC. He has vast expertise in artificial intelligence and biomedical data science and has authored several academic papers especially in the field of machine learning, medical image analysis and biomedical data science. At the ITU workshop on "Artificial Intelligence for Health, 2019 " he will be talking about the availability of datasets for AI research in Africa and a way forward. |
 Thomas Wiegand
FG-AI4H Chair, Fraunhofer HHI, Germany
Thomas Wiegand is a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and is jointly heading the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University and co-founded several startup companies. For his research and publications, he received numerous awards. Thomson Reuters named him in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” as one of the most cited researchers in his field. He has been elected to the German National Acdemy of Engineering (Acatech) and the National Academy of Science (Leopoldina). He is a recipient of the ITU150 Award. Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with many successful submissions to ITU-T and ISO/IEC. In 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG. |
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