Andela, UNODC host students on technology to tackle social vices

Tue, Feb 11, 2020
By publisher
3 MIN READ

Business

AN engineering technology firm, Andela, has hosted 50 students from selected Nigerian tertiary institutions for the invention of technology to solve crimes.

Andela hosted the students in partnership with United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Facebook at the 2020 Hackathon for Justice.

At this Hackathon, young Nigerians passionate about coding, peace, and justice, will have the opportunity to build projects that demonstrate how technology can help achieve global goals and tackle rule of law issues.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Andela is an engineering-as-a-service business that helps companies build teams quickly and cost-effectively so they can ship faster.

The winning team, Predex, made up of students from Covenant University and the University of Lagos, won an all-expenses-paid trip to Kyoto, Japan for a UNODC conference.

The team developed their deep learning model investigators’ solution that could be used to detect child predators prowling on their victims before they strike.

The solution specifically flags suspicious conversations between children and potential predators, thereby helping authorities and parents prevent cases early enough.

The runner-up team, RecyclAI, built a solution that is based on Object Classification using Artificial Intelligence to detect recyclable e-waste.

The team added key features like educational blogs, newsletters, and conferences meetups, to sensitise users about the solutions to e-waste recycling on their web application.

Team InsideLife VR came third in the competition with their solution which employs the cardboard virtual reality SDK to implement an easily-accessible interactive experience that is highly educative on some of the more subtle aspects of the rule of law.

These second and third-placed teams won Oculus Go devices and Sure Gift Coupons respectively.

Omogbolahan Alli, Partner Engineering Manager at Andela said: “It was a pleasure hosting Hackathon4Justice for the second year running at Andela.

“The energy that radiated from these young students as they focused on their projects was incredible.

“Andela is known for being the home of and for celebrating technical excellence.

“Seeing how this group of students tackled the problems they were given, their approach to teamwork, the focus that they had in order to meet the deadlines was fantastic; and demonstrates that we should be very proud of the future technical talents Nigeria has to offer.’’

According to him, this is the second year of Hackathon for Justice and we are grateful to our partners, UNDOC and Facebook, as well as all the students who participated.

“We hope to make this regular on the Andela calendar, as we continue to build a community for the incredible engineering talents on the continent,” Ali said.

He, however, said that through the UNODC’s Education for Justice Initiative, students from universities across Nigeria came together with the purpose of building prototype solutions that can help tackle crime, uphold justice and promote the rule of law.

He said participants were divided into teams to build prototype solutions that addressed an array of social challenges including the disposal of e-waste, trafficking illegal products, child abuse, and trafficking.

Others are, supporting the authorities to eliminate animal poaching, increase awareness for proactive crime awareness and tackling corruption in institutions.

The Hackathon for Justice 2.0 Judges, which include Andrew Okoh, Facebook Software Engineer and Gilberto Duarte, UNODC Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer, praised the winners for committed to using technology for social good. (NAN)

– Feb. 11, 2020 @ 14:29 GMT |

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