Get Out There!
On Friday 6th September 2024, we will make a poster paper presentation at Deep Learning Indaba at Dakar, Senegal. The title of our paper is “VitSegh24: Illegal Mining Footprints Surveillance with GeoSpatial Imagery of Ghana. “
It is the first light of day for our idea to help solve problems associated with illegal mining (galamsey) in Ghana. For some years galamsey has destroyed Ghana and its lands and rivers, causing several other undiscovered, yet related problems. As this menace continues its journey, we also begin ours. And though it might look like it has existed before we came along, we believe we are in a wining race because we are assisted by Artificial Intelligence, the tool of the era.
This is our first project as a social good initiative, and it has led us on several downstream paths we couldn’t have imagined. We came together and organised ourselves as an institution for social-good. We also registered our domain & website (this website), built our first “whacky” model which we are calling Vitsegh24, within a month, and prepare to make a poster presentation on it at the Indaba. It also caused us to gather several minds - whom otherwise would have remained silent - towards a cause of a lifetime.
At the time of writing, having not yet completed our presentation, we have our fingers crossed that our initiative continues to lead us down this great path. A path where it brings good to the entirety of Ghana and Africa, and ultimately helps us to save our country, river bodies, fresh water sources and the future of many generations to come.
As we take responsibility and overcome this menace, we invite all interested parties to join us and support us to do this work. We extend our sincerest appreciations to the team at AWS Rapid Ramp Program for their $300 worth of credits that have led us on thus far.
To all reading this, we say Y3betumi (which translates as: we can) - the theme of the Indaba when it was held in Ghana.