For developing an Artificial Intelligence solution to the Turkey earthquake, which claimed the lives of not fewer than 50,000 people and left thousands injured in February, a Nigerian data scientist based in Turkey, Leonardo Iheme, has won the SAS Hackathon 2023 award.
Leonardo Iheme (Nigerian), James Swinnerton (UK based), and Can Tosun, all from EPAM System, entered the competition and won in two categories – the natural language and the regional awards (Europe, Middle East, and Africa).
The devastating earthquake in Turkey in February put the country in disarray. One of the problems faced by aid givers was the inability to pinpoint the areas that needed the most help. Tweets and hashtags were popping up from different parts of the country and went viral.
Leonardo, popularly known as Leo, said, “When people tweeted about the number of people who needed help in a particular area, we could aggregate those tweets, but there was no infrastructure in place to do so.
“That was when we saw the opportunity and decided to use natural language processing to gather all these tweets from Twitter, convert them into addresses, and then convert these addresses into geolocation through longitude and latitude.
“Natural Language Processing helped a lot in processing these tweets. With these converted locations, we were able to obtain satellite images and compare ‘before and after’ the images for confirmation of the quake.
For example, saying that there used to be 50 buildings here and now there are only 30 because of the earthquake. We were able to gather such data, and this really helped the aid workers prioritize the most distressed scenes. That was compelling enough for the panel of judges,” he said.
Leonardo and his team had previously won a Turkish national award for developing artificial intelligence (AI) to detect tumours in breast cancer. The government organized a competition on using AI to solve health-related problems. “It’s my passion as well, so I led a team to win this AI Competition for health,” he said.
“We had a couple of the organizers share ultrasound images – some with tumours and others without tumours – and the goal was to accurately detect the tumours because that would help the doctors localize them, which is the challenge the radiologists face.
Sometimes, they look at these images but can’t make decisions because they can’t see the tumour and if there is a tumour, they can’t determine its size. This is where AI can really assist them.
“We entered this competition, and we emerged as the winners. I was particularly proud because I led the data scientists there. We won at that big event where the President of Turkey was in attendance and greeted us,” he said.
Leonardo Iheme was born and raised in Bauchi. His father, Dr Andee Iheme, a retired public relations expert, is from Imo State, and his mother, Mrs Moji Iheme, a university lecturer, is from Kogi State.
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