Fields
Four fields that overlap a great deal in practice. For each one, what it covers and what the center does in it.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence covers the methods that let a machine carry out tasks once associated with human judgement: recognizing an image or a voice, understanding and producing text, anticipating a breakdown or a need. Most current systems rely on machine learning, meaning models that learn from examples rather than from hand-written rules.
In Africa, the challenge goes beyond adopting tools built elsewhere. Many models perform poorly in local languages or on data unlike the data they were trained on. Building data and models suited to the Ivorian context is part of the work.
What the center does
- Supervising theses in speech processing, graph learning and AI for agriculture.
- Research on the reliability of conversational assistants that draw on documents (RAG).
- AI training for managers and technical teams.
Data science
Data science is about getting useful answers out of raw data. It combines statistics, programming and knowledge of the field in question: a good model for forecasting sales or hospital attendance requires understanding what the figures actually measure.
The work often follows the same path. You frame a precise question, gather and clean the data, explore it, build a model, then check that it holds on cases it has never seen before handing it to decision makers.
What the center does
- Methodological support for organizations that want to use their own data.
- Training in Python, applied statistics and machine learning.
- Research on road traffic modelling from sensor data.
Big data
Big data refers to data whose volume, speed of arrival or variety exceeds what conventional management software can handle. Call records from a mobile operator, electronic payment transactions and continuous sensor readings are examples.
Such data calls for dedicated architectures for distributed storage and computing. It also raises governance questions: who can access it, how to protect the people concerned, where to host it.
What the center does
- Advice on data architecture and on the governance of public data.
- Raising awareness among public bodies of personal data protection issues.
Digital transformation
An organization transforms when digital technology changes the way it serves users, makes decisions and works, and not only its tools. Putting a form online achieves little if the processing chain behind it stays the same.
The obstacles are well known: insufficient funding, uneven Internet coverage between cities and rural areas, low digital literacy, incomplete legal frameworks and resistance to change. They largely explain the gap between African administrations and those of industrialized countries, which nonetheless face their own problems of IT security and constant adaptation.
What the center does
- Supporting public bodies and companies in their digital projects, drawing on members' experience as heads of information systems.
- Studies on the state of digital transformation and recommendations for decision makers.
Need training in one of these fields?
The center adapts its content to your team's level and sector.