AI built around the realities in which it will be used.
YARA's AI research examines the data, methods and decisions behind artificial-intelligence systems, with particular attention to African contexts.
Core Focus Sub-Themes
- 1.
AI Foundations
African data, benchmarks, model evaluation and methods designed for settings where data or compute may be limited.
- 2.
Applied AI
The use of AI in health, agriculture, finance, climate, science and other areas where better tools could answer practical questions.
- 3.
Governance & Safety
How AI systems are evaluated, deployed and governed, including privacy, accountability, bias, standards and safety.
Active AI Research Projects
Artificial Intelligence · Financial Systems
Can transaction histories improve credit-risk modelling where conventional credit data is limited?
Benjamin Ekow Attabra
Research comparing sequential neural networks and conventional models using mobile financial-service transaction histories.
Artificial Intelligence · Agriculture
Can AI diagnose crop pests and diseases from text when labelled data is scarce?
Essel-Biney Nana Benyin Eboe Nyamekye
Research comparing few-shot approaches for text-based diagnosis of pests and diseases affecting maize, tomato and cassava.
Artificial Intelligence · Public Health
Can pneumonia screening run safely on small devices without reliable internet access?
McGovern Twumasi Owusu-Bekoe
Research into compact offline pneumonia screening, edge deployment and the safety effects of model compression.
Artificial Intelligence · African Data
How can movement in Ampe be documented for computational research and preservation?
Ruth Biney Senior
Research creating machine-readable movement data from Ampe for computational study and preservation.