How far has African Data Initiative Gone?

Recently, the actual development of the African data initiative project started. I am seeking to look back and see the progress that we have made since the team started actual work and where we are headed to in a few weeks to come before Christmas.

African Data Initiative is the Latest project by the African Maths Initiative (AMI) which seeks to bridge the gap that exists in understanding of statistics. Through AMI works in Africa in partnership with Statistical Service Center, it was clearly evident that there was a problem with learning, understanding and teaching of statistics and hence this initiative came about. This seeks to solve this problem in four easy phases. First phase is building a simple but powerful statistical software to be used in all academic levels.  This software will be a menu driven software but runs the most powerful data analysis software called R.

Second phase will be using the software by the lectures to teach statistics in universities in a simple but concrete way. This will facilitate better learning and understanding of statistics which will in long term facilitate good decision making. Third phase is to have a wide variety of audience by having the software able to be translated to as many languages as possible and finally to use the software in all levels of education to enhance teaching of statistics.

I have never been involved with this kind of a big project before. It is really overwhelming and there is equally as much learning as working. I have the roles of implementing the multilingual capability of the software as well as working on the front end.

Currently, we have managed to achieve a lot. The loading of data to the software, and establishing a link to R from the front end was one of the biggest milestones. We are now able to send commands to R through the menu system. We have quite a good number of dialogs working and most plots in statistics working as well. They are generated in R and the output displayed in R graphics. This has just been achieved in a few weeks and we are working tirelessly to make sure that in less than a years’ time we deliver a complete package.

We will be releasing the alpha release soon, actually in a few weeks from now. This will come before Christmas. It will have all the basic functionalities. The other releases will include beta release as anticipated in February and a final release in June.   

It has an amazing experience to be part of this team. It is really evident from this progress that we have made by now we will be able to deliver this package by June. We greatly appreciate the support from everyone out there. Its through that support we are able to develop this life changing statistical software.

My translations work for African Data Initiative Project

Around the world, more than 95% of the population are not native English speakers. English is learnt by about half of the world's population as their second language. From statistics, we know that more than half of the world’s population is more comfortable with not speaking English. For this reason, it is important  that we develop solutions that are localized to as many as languages as possible to ensure that we cater for the better part of the audience who are not comfortable speaking English.

At African Maths Initiative (AMI), we believe that this is a practice that should be embraced by software and applications developers  in order to get more market and audience for the solutions developed. In the latest project by AMI, the African Data Initiative, we have embraced this method of developing software that has translations capability to many languages.

Among the roles that I have in this project is to ensure that the new statistical package has multilingual capabilities. Within the last two Weeks I have managed to set up tools that will be used in the entire project in implementation of translations. I am using the Multilingual App Toolkit from Microsoft which is a free adon that integrates well with visual studio, the Integrated Development Environment we are using in development of the software.

Currently, we have implemented two languages, Kiswahili and French. Having that the actual development of the software was launched in Tanzania, and most people speak Kiswahili, it was our motivation to translate the software first in Kiswahili, a language spoken by over 100m people across the world. Having no funds to do this, we are still looking into ways that we could implement multilingual crowd-sourcing where we will have people of goodwill and volunteers help in translations to the languages they are most proficient in. We need this also because, the translations we have from the translation provider may not be as accurate as they should be since they are machine translations which are derived from Google Translate.

Apart from this work on multilingual implementation, I also had a lecture at African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Tanzania, where a colleague at work, John Lunalo and I delivered a lecture on Open Data Kit, a free mobile data collection and management solution. This was an exciting opportunity to teach among the top creams in Africa a new concept. It all went well. We greatly appreciate the opportunity and the AIMS Tanzania administration for granting us that chance.                                                       

                                        

We look forward to incorporating more languages as we go by. It is in our objectives to make sure everyone around the world will be able to use our new statistical software with the language the understand best. this will in turn improve understanding, learning and teaching of statistics.