The Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI) and benshi.ai has signed a 3-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on 10 January 2022 to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to boost public health research outcomes in Ethiopia.
The MOU will cover wide-ranging areas of collaboration, including:
- Capacity building for EPHI researchers in AI. As a start, benshi.ai will conduct a 1-week introductory AI and machine learning course for EPHI management, over 50 researchers, and frontline health workers in Ethiopia.
- Using AI tools to generate research and evidence on selected public health nutrition issues.
- Publicizing the outcomes of the collaboration to promote the use of AI to produce high-quality nutrition research in Ethiopia.
Together with benshi.ai, EPHI’s Food Science and Nutrition Research Directorate is leading this collaboration. As a result, one of the main areas of research will be dietary difficulties and malnutrition.
This collaboration represents the first time that AI is introduced in research for public health nutrition at a national level in Ethiopia. By working closely with benshi.ai, a global non-profit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, EPHI aims to leverage advanced technologies and techniques to provide data-driven insights and boost strategies and outcomes for public health in Ethiopia.
Director of EPHI’s Food Science and Nutrition Research Directorate, Dr. Masresha Tesema, said: “Machine learning is key to excellent research. EPHI’s collaboration with benshi.ai has a lot of promise for integrating AI and machine learning in nutrition research. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help nutritionists conduct high-quality research. Researchers will be able to embrace and sustain machine learning methodologies while delivering high-quality research output as a result of our collaboration. We’ll be partnering with benshi.ai from 2022 through 2024.”
CEO and Founder of benshi.ai, Dr. África Periáñez, said: “We are delighted about this unique opportunity to collaborate with EPHI. Government institutions are one of the key pillars of our partnerships in improving global health. By combining our AI expertise with EPHI’s knowledge on the ground, we look forward to bringing a new level of data-driven understanding for individual, population, and public health in Ethiopia.”
The Ethiopian Public Health Institute, the research wing of the Ministry of Health (MOH), is established to improve the health of the general public of Ethiopia through research on priority health and nutrition issues for evidence-based information utilization and technology transfer; effective public health emergency management; establishing quality laboratory system; and training public health researchers and practitioners for best public health interventions. EPHI envisioned to be a center of excellence in public health in Africa.
benshi.ai benshi.ai is a non-profit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that aims to improve the health of individuals and populations in resource-poor countries through advanced artificial intelligence applications. For that purpose, benshi.ai provides powerful, personalized, data-driven insights to medical care teams and individual patients, and focuses on four main areas of research: a. Reinforcement learning b. Causal inference c. Experimental design d. Dynamic predictive modeling
Source: Press Statement
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