Researchers Ready AI Tool to Enable Data Sharing for Scientists Across Africa

African law researchers have designed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to enable scientists on the continent to share their data. According to Aliki Edgcumbe, a law scholar based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and one of the tool’s creators, the tool will manage intricate data-sharing laws, which are “hindering a lot of science.”

The chatbot is expected to be launched next month and will be a free resource, allowing scientists to untangle the legal side of data sharing. Notably, it has been trained on the data regulations of 12 African countries—Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, The Gambia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe—but more countries could be added, Edgecumbe says. Built using the same technology as ChatGPT, it “looks and feels” like talking to any other AI chatbot, she adds.

Further, the tool has been developed by Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa), a US$74.5 million five-year research program funded by the National Institutes of Health in the United States to build data science capacity in Africa.

The tool has already been tested by researchers at the Heat and Health African Transdisciplinary Center at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their project, funded by DS-I Africa, aims to leverage more than 200 health data sets collected from 20 African countries to tease out the effects of heat on wellbeing and disease.

Craig Parker, a Wits data scientist who works on the project, said that at the beginning of the project, it was unclear whether moving data sets out of their countries of origin for further analysis would be possible. However, the AI chatbot has helped them move 27 of the data sets already, he says.