Uganda's Victor Miclovich talks Machine Learning

If you were there or following South by South West yesterday, you may have heard some chatter on Twitter about the Africa 3.0 talk by Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora. In his panel he used Skype video to chat in real time with software developers and incubators in Cameroon, Kenya and with my staff in Uganda. Two of the developers from Appfrica, Moses Mugisha and Victor Miclovich appeared with me on camera to speak with the crowd. One of them, Victor, quickly discussed his natural language processing project SiLCC. Here's a quick interview allowing him more time to explain his background, how he got into semantic programming and why peer learning is critical.

In the post Natural Language Processing with Swift River I introduced you to two underlying technologies powering Swiftriver. Victor Miclovich is the Ugandan volunteer developer who's spent the last few months working to help make these plans reality with SiLCC (Swift Language Computation Core).

How did you get involved with natural language processing technologies? It's not a field many Africans are known to be active in. Victor Miclovich: When I got hooked up with writing code, I discovered another side of computing as a kid. That side of computing led me to doing heavy research work and this fired up my inquisitiveness. NLP wasn't what I played with first. I started with doing work inside of artificial intelligence which surprisingly had a likeliness to programming. As I matured in the area, I realized that one would never really master everything in A.I. (artificial intelligence) and so I narrowed my work to machine learning which was about 2 years ago. Machine learning is a wide subject with lots of literature and research work being done in many areas from computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing...the list is actually endless. I settled for computer vision work and NLP eventually because of their feasibility and ease of access to technology in Africa. I knew that getting a robot built could be a little bit hard! (laughs) That's how I got involved with NLP technologies; my curiosity drove me to it. What inspires you as a software developer? VM: First, it is my drive and passion for technology. Being able to instruct a machine to do your bidding is something that brings a sense of fulfillment. People don't always follow my instructions. Secondly, the people (developers) I encounter wherever I work and go bring inspiration to me...this is just my way of saying that Appfricans are my inspiration...their accomplishments and determination is what keeps me going. How do you see Africa's role in tech changing over the next 20 years? VM: Africa's role in tech is slowly becoming visible. Universities in Africa are slowly churning up new grads every year. These grads have ambition and are tired of staying behind technology. This is what is going to drive the change in tech. When students or people get tired of being behind, they develop a strong desire for change...we should not be pessimistic about this, we are optimistic! There are many floating examples all over Africa of tech communities and start-ups sprouting up. You're very involved in the community and helping the guys coming up behind you, giving gratis lectures and workshops at your university and mentoring your peers in your spare time. Why do you feel this is important? VM: It is always important to give back to mankind. Philanthropy has it's rewards. I feel that if I don't do something, those are years lost to the community. I have lived in a place where I've seen folks with lots of potential and those that have made it in life and science (or tech). Many stay arrogant and don't give back to the community...they end up living lavish lives with lots of wealth and of course, who else will suffer? The community will. It suffers because those well off folks only do things that will help themselves. On the other side of things, my giving back to the community helps make more folks like me or even better than me. This means that we shall get thinkers rising exponentially and an increase of great ideas that won't end up being recursively boring but wonderful! These are the main reasons I feel what I'm doing is important. How has it been working with the global developer community? Have you learned a lot? VM: Working with a global developer community has been very interesting. I've virtually met folks that have done cool stuff with their time and this has been quite inspiring. It has boosted the quality of the work that I do because of the huge amounts I learn from my peers in the global dev community. You can follow Victor's work on SiLCC here or on the Swift River mailing-list.