Bluechip Technologies Limited, a leading indigenous business applications and data management solutions firm continues its commitment to capacity building with the sponsorship of the second edition of the Inter-Campus Machine Learning competition. The competition, which has about hundred universities and polytechnics across all the states of Nigeria, is an attempt to increase local capacity, enhance the opportunities and employability of Nigerian students through an incentivised exposure to advanced knowledge in Data Science, which is now world’s No 1 career. 

Bluechip Technologies previously sponsored the event last year as part of its 10th-year commemorative event. The competition, organised by Data Science Nigeria is now at the final stage where the best 150 students on the global data science platform, Kaggle, will be invited to a 6-day residential all-expense-paid training bootcamp in Lagos between 19th and 24th November 2019. 

Bluechip Technologies was established in 2008, to develop a customer-centric approach for delivering data management expertise to guide the decision-making capacity of financial, telecommunications, manufacturing and public sector organizations. In 2010, the company began to diversify its services across Africa with offices in Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through a suite of innovative proprietary technology products and strategic partnerships with the leading Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and multi-nationals, the company has tripled in size and impact over the past decade.

The company has also been heavily involved in educational development and local talent building through its endowment and multiple internship programme. Kazeem Tewogbade, Managing Director, Bluechip Technologies Limited, commenting on the milestone, stated, “Bluechip Technologies believe that digital skills will shape the future of Nigeria and building capacity in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence will transform our country and this is why we remain committed to doing this as part of our corporate social responsibility agenda”

Olumide Soyombo, Co-founder, Bluechip Technologies also commented: “Our growth as a company has shown the power of possibilities and indigenous brilliance that exists in every corner of Nigeria. We are excited to support students to an all-expense-paid bootcamp where best talents are powered to become employable”. 

The 6-day residential bootcamp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Kaggle platform. It will also include the finals of the selection quiz competition to determine the beneficiary of the award of Masters in Artificial Intelligence scholarship at the Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa. The bootcamp learning sessions will be enriched by twenty five (25) leading experts from different parts of the world, including Prof Tom Dietterich, Distinguished Professor & Director Oregon State University & Founder BigML; Kris Sankaran, PhD, MILA Canada; Prof Anima Anandkumar, Professor of Computing, CalTech, USA; Kathleen Siminyu, AI4Development, Kenya; Dr. Stephen G. Odaibo, CEO, RetinaAI, USA; Samuel Edet, Joint PhD, Student IMT, Italy and Ku Leuven, Belgium; Wale Akinfaderin, PhD, Senior Data Scientist, Duke Energy; Emmanuel Doro, PhD, Data Science Director, Walmart, USA; Uzo Mkparu, Group Head, CRM, Customer Analytics & Insights FCMB; Pascal Bernard, Head of Data Science, OneFi; Elaine Nsoesie, PhD, Assistant Professor, Botson University; Prof. Kunle Olukotun, Professor at Stanford University; Dr. Nnana Orieke, Cloud Solution Architect, Data and AI, Microsoft; Nicholas Litombe, PhD, Data Scientist, Physicist; Robert John, Data Science Officer, EnterFive; Dr. Sakinat Folorunsho, Lecturer, Computer Science, OOU; Olubayo Adekanmbi, Convener, Data Science Nigeria, Chief Transformation Officer, MTN Nigeria among others.

Data Science Nigeria is a non-profit initiative of MTN’s Chief Transformation Officer, Bayo Adekanmbi, spurred on by a compelling drive to raise a new generation of data scientists and knowledge entrepreneurs who will lead high-impact Artificial Intelligence research for socio-economic development, transformational innovation and economic prosperity of Nigeria and the continent at large. 

Participation in the 6-day AI bootcamp is based on pre-competition Kaggle qualification at https://www.kaggle.com/c/intercampusai2019 and 100 Days of Machine/Deep learning classes at https://t.co/wBm6Qsul6b

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