Darlington Akogo

Darlington Akogo is a global leader in Artificial Intelligence. He’s the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at minoHealth Al Labs; an Al Healthtech company; karaAgro Al; an Al-powered Plant &Pest Disease Detection and Precision Agriculture platform, Runmila Al Institute; an Al and Data Science training institute, and Gudra Al Studio; an organization broadly exploring Al and Exponential Technologies applied various domains including Transportation, Sanitation and Energy. Akogo has been named one of the Global Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) in Healthcare. He’s the Chair (Topic Driver) of the Topic Group on Al for Radiology under the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and World Health Organization (WHO) Focus Group on ‘Artificial Intelligence for Health’ (FG-AI4H). At UN FG-AI4H, Akogo leads the development of global regulations and standards for Al in radiology. 

He also works with African Union, where he serves as the Chair for the working group on Artificial Intelligence Economy, working towards the development of a Continental African Union (AU) Artificial Intelligence (Al) Continental Strategy that includes legislative, regulatory, ethical, policy, and infrastructural frameworks in consultation with stakeholders such as AU Member States’ governments, private sector, academia, innovators, and consumers. He serves as a Global Innovation Adviser (GIA) to the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA), where he provides advice on how to ensure international development agencies are implementing responsible and localized Emerging Technology across the various countries they are in. 

IDIA is an alliance between the top 15 international development agencies with the shared goal of “actively promoting and advancing innovation as a means to help achieve sustainable development”.’ Its members include the Rockefeller Foundation, Bil &Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Affairs Canada.

Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ), Global Innovation Fund, Grand Challenges Canada, Skoll Foundation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), UNICEF, and USAID. He’s a Research Co-Investigator, Data Management Lead, and Chair of Data group for the project “NIHR Global Health Research Group on Digital Diagnostics for African Health Systems”, led by Imperial College London in partnership with minoHealth Al Labs and other organizations, with prior funding from UKRI. He served as the co-chair of the Digital Health &Al Global Health Strategy Group, created by University of Oxford and 13 partners from around the world including minoHealth Al Labs, Robert Koch Institute, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Oxford University Clinical Research Unit – OUCRU Vietnam, Financial Times, Technische Universität Berlin, Clinical Information Network – KEMRI / Wellcome Trust Programme, Aga Khan Development Network.

He is the Team Leader (Director) for GIZ Al4Cashew project. KaraAgro Al won the contract to implement the activity “Leveraging Machine Learning For the Ghanaian Cashew Sector Based on Drone and Satellite Imagery Data” for FAIR Forward. On behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) implements the project “FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All”. He also serves as the Principal Investigator and Director for the Lacuna Fund project, Drone-Based Agricultural Dataset for Crop Yield Estimation, by KaraAgro Al in collaboration with Makerere Al Lab (Makerere University). He serves as the Director for another Lacuna Fund project in health under the title, Datasets for Al-Based Diagnosis of Malaria, which is a collaboration between Makerere Al Lab (Makerere University) and MinoHealth Al Lab. He serves as the Al Lead (Consultant) for the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Lab (RAIL) under Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), funded by the International Development Research Centre (DRC) and GIZ.

He served as the Lead (Ghana) for the Lacuna Fund project, Crop Disease &Pest Image Data, by Makerere University and KaraAgro Al, the Nelson-Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, and Namibia University of Science and Technology, where he leads a team of 40 people across industry, academia and government towards the creation of large robust datasets for computer vision solutions towards early disease and pest detection. In addition to this work, Akogo served as a member of the MIT Tech Review Global Panel. Akogo also taught as a Lecturer (Adjunct Faculty) of Artificial Intelligence at Academic City College, where he created a new Deep Learning Al curriculum for the university and served as the Bioinformatics (Al & Data Analytics) Resource Person at West African Centre for Cell Biology and Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP). 

Akogo is an Advisory Board Member and Ambassador to West Africa at Al Expo Africa, the largest business focused Al community in Africa. He is a member of the MIT Tech Review Global Panel. And he’s a Global Shaper under the World Economic Forum. He has served as an Al and Industry 4.0 expert and resource person to African Union (AU), various United Nations (UN) agencies, and African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) in the development of multilateral Al and Industry 4.0 strategies, policies and regulations. He has spoken at numerous international conferences including NeurIPS, MIT’s Global Community BioSummit, African Union Africa Industrialization Week, EU: Africa The Post Crisis Journey, DASH with Harvard Global Health Initiative, MIT Critical Data and Novartis, NVIDIA GTC, World Al Cannes Festival, several United Nations meetings and workshops, Rightscon and the ACP Heads of States and Government Summit, amongst others. He has been a guest speaker at Yale University, Washington State University, Technical University of Munich, University of Lagos, University of Ghana, among others. His work was fea- tured in the scientific book, Advances in Information and Communication’. Alongside great minds including Yoshua Bengio, who’s celebrated as one of the Fathers of Deep Learning, Darlington is featured in and wrote for the book, “Artificial Intelligence Simplified :99 Use Cases And Expert Thoughts For Starters”. He has written opeds for Financial Times and other media outlets.