Nigeria’s Chinasa Okolo, Kauna Malgwi named among Time 100 most influential people in AI 

Chinasa Okolo, a Nigerian-American computer scientist and a Brookings Institution fellow, has been named among the 2024 Time 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI).

Okolo is recognised in the ‘Thinkers category’ for mitigating the risks facing communities in the Global South that might be left behind technologically, victimised by biased systems, or exploited for their data as AI development emerges from Silicon Valley.

The Time magazine said she has been doing this through policy advocacy, public speaking and releasing research papers.

She has recently contributed passages to the international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI, led by Yoshua Bengio; the African Union’s strategy for responsible AI adoption; and Nigeria’s national AI strategy.

“Through these endeavours and her research, she is raising awareness about the benefits using AI could bring to countries across Africa—including the detection of floods and crop diseases—as well as its potential harms, such as digitally-enabled harassment on microlending platforms,” the magazine wrote.

She is recognised in the same category as Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association.

Pringle aided the responsible deployment of AI in schools in the US after releasing a roadmap that explored AI professional development, mitigating student harms, and equity in access.

Also, Kauna Malgwi, chairperson of the Nigeria chapter of the Content Moderators Union, is named in the ‘Shapers category’.

Malgwi is a leading voice in content moderation for advanced AI.

She worked as a contract contractor for Sama, a generative AI and computer vision data annotation company, where she gained experience that shaped her views on AI systems.

Malgwi is in the Shapers category alongside Steve Huffman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Reddit, a company with social networks and formidable homes for user-generated content.

In May, Huffman partnered with OpenAI, allowing ChapGPT to train on Reddit content—one of the largest archives of human conversations in existence.

Some other honourees are Sam Altam, the chief executive officer (CEO) of OpenAI; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet; Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft; Sasha Luccioni; and AI & Climate Lead at Hugging Face.

Time said the purpose of the recognition is to spark conversation on AI development and deployment based on the views of the 100 honourees.