Hamza Kyamanywa

I owe all my opportunities to education. I was only able to move from Uganda to South Korea because of a scholarship from the Korean Government. I believe that education is the ultimate equalizer and distributor of opportunities. I had no right to study at a Korea university, let alone to work in Korea as an engineer, but education made this possible. Now, thanks to this opportunity I speak a new language - Korean, I have learned a new culture and I’ve explored a new country and continent. I have also realized my childhood dream of becoming an electrical engineer and also pursued my passion in software engineering. This effect of education can be significantly multiplied if integrated with technology. My work as a software engineer at Bebridge Inc. has brought me close enough to witness this firsthand. I have seen what a simple tool like Slid can do for online learners studying from videos, infact I used it myself before I went to work there. I also saw how much more useful it became when we began building AI features on top of it. I am convinced through this experience that through education we can change the lives of multitudes of people from around the world, and with technology and AI we can empower them to learn faster and more efficiently at a rate not seen before. We can level the world with EdTech! This belief in the power of education and knowledge sharing is part of the reason I founded Jenga CodeLabs.

I participate part-time in AI research and regularly contribute to open source because I have noticed firsthand the importance of having people of various backgrounds work on technology together. At Bebrige Inc., where I work as a software engineer, I have observed that many of the features [link to my projects] I work on, usually work very well in the English language by default and then work well in Korean later. I usually need some assistance from a Korean college of mine to translate them into Korean. This means there is naturally a time lag until these features are available to our Korean language-speaking users. For most simple apps and technology, this is not a big deal. However, when it comes to AI-based features like the real-time video transcription feature, our chatbot - AI Sliddy, or the video summarization engine that I built, this is a big deal. AI is such a powerful tool that if only a portion of the population (or a small part of your users) have access to it, they immediately have a significant advantage over the other users. AI is so important that it can’t just work well for only a few people. It should benefit everyone, not just the wealthiest countries and brightest minds. The only way to ensure this is to make sure people of different backgrounds work together in AI research and development. As an African engineer, I don’t take for granted the opportunity I have to represent my continent in being able to participate in building the technology of the future. I consider it my responsibility to work on it so that people like me can use it.