Progress on Nkrumahlands
We at armtos gave our word to you in the past that we are working on launching a tool that can help to address illegal mining in Ghana. Today, we are still not yet there. But we have made good progress and we want to share that.
We are sharing with you Nkrumahlands, a simple 3D map platform with Machine Learning segmentations of predicted masks of mining sites spread all over Ghana with only observed lower accuracy along settlements. In our opinion, it is beautiful progress. This is because this milestone sets the framework for what is coming and gives perspective to everyone who wondered about our goal exactly what it is we are building.
Moreover, the predictions are not entirely bad. We observe wrong predictions around settlements because our training data for the underlying machine learning model did not factor for those cases. We aimed for accuracy in already observed mining site predictions than for locations with no mining sites. We achieved this perfectly. Looking along the riverine regions of Odumasi and Obuasi near Kumasi on the map, it is observed that the predictions are near accurate. The wrongly predicted settlements and communities along the Tamale and Damongo going to the Northern parts of Ghana were only observed after mapping all the predictions on the final 3D map.
With more iterations and improvements on these parts, one can only imagine the level of correctness we can achieve and how much intelligence can be gathered from processing of these predictions. We will for sure be making these iterations in time. But, for now, we are excited about this milestone we have achieved - an end-to-end solution of our initial solution idea which we first presented at Deep Learning Indaba conference last year in Senegal. We believe and hope that our progress continues unhindered. Our only challenges we foresee at the moment are financial and updated satellite data for up-to-date intelligence.
These are the unofficial motivations for sharing this progress. We hope that by showing our hand, and sharing our progress you will appreciate the value in it now and more so once when it is finished. Then, when we come calling, we will have your support in magnitudes than we could imagine. We will be updating our donations page very soon so that anyone willing to support us can do so.
Until then, thank you for your time and for reading our message while we celebrate this milestone in our journey towards building intelligence for illegal mining sites in Ghana.
Many regards.