Author: The Conversation

On paper, privacy rights for citizens of countries throughout Africa are well protected. Privacy rights are written into constitutions, international human rights conventions and domestic law. But, in the first comparative review of privacy protections across Africa, the evidence is clear: governments are purposefully using laws that lack clarity. Or they ignore laws completely in order to carry out illegal digital surveillance of their citizens. What’s more, they are doing so with impunity. This matters because people’s lives are increasingly being lived online, through conversations on social media, online banking and the like. We’ve just published research on privacy protections in six African countries…

The World Health Organisation and the COVID Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative announced in mid-2021 that they were working with a consortium to establish the first COVID messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology transfer hub on the African continent, in South Africa. The Conversation Africa’s Natasha Joseph spoke with Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s managing director and a professor at South Africa’s North-West University, about what this work entails – and what it will mean for the continent. What is a technology transfer hub? The technology transfer model is designed to create a platform that facilitates localised manufacturing of vaccines and stimulates vaccine innovation through…

This week, Russia tested an anti-satellite missile on one of its own satellites, COSMOS 1408, and created a stream of debris that forced the International Space Station (ISS) crew to take shelter in their Soyuz and SpaceX Dragon capsules. The action has generated widespread international condemnation, including from the US Space Command, US State Department and UK Ministry of Defence. And rightly so; it was an irresponsible and menacing action in the context of recent progress towards global agreements on the responsible use of outer space. Russia have conducted an anti-satellite missile test.Defence Secretary @BWallaceMP has condemned this activity. pic.twitter.com/Z3sRrSlEBP— Ministry of Defence…

Cryptocurrencies have had an exceptional year, reaching a combined value of more than US$3 trillion (£2.2 trillion) for the first time in November. The market seems to have benefited from the public having time on their hands during pandemic lockdowns. Also, large investment funds and banks have stepped in, not least with the recent launch of the first bitcoin-backed ETF – a listed fund that makes it easier for more investors to get exposure to this asset class. Alongside this has been an explosive rise in the value of stablecoins like tether, USDC and Binance USD. Like other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins move around on the…

While the art of conversation in machines is limited, there are improvements with every iteration. As machines are developed to navigate complex conversations, there will be technical and ethical challenges in how they detect and respond to sensitive human issues. Our work involves building chatbots for a range of uses in health care. Our system, which incorporates multiple algorithms used in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, has been in development at the Australian e-Health Research Centre since 2014. The system has generated several chatbot apps which are being trialled among selected individuals, usually with an underlying medical condition or who…

I regularly fly with KLM from Minneapolis to New Delhi, and always stop over in Amsterdam. I am frequently in Minneapolis for research and this is my route to go home to take a break from work. I have done the journey so many times that I know almost all the shops at Schiphol inside out. However, one time in summer 2019, the predictability was broken when I missed my connecting flight to New Delhi. I was tired, hungry, sleepy, and the customer-service counter was closed. I had the choice to make the long walk to customer services at the…

Nigeria recently became the first African country to introduce a digital currency. It joins the Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank in being among the first jurisdictions in the world to roll out national digital currencies. The Conversation Africa’s Wale Fatade asks Iwa Salami what a digital currency is and whether Nigeria can achieve its aims of introducing the currency. What is a digital currency and how does it work? A digital currency is a means of payment or money that exists in a purely electronic form. Central bank digital currencies are issued and regulated by the nation’s monetary authority, or central bank,…

Earlier this week, the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to maneouvre out of the way of a potential collision with space junk. With a crew of astronauts and cosmonauts on board, this required an urgent change of orbit on November 11. Over the station’s 23-year orbital lifetime, there have been about 30 close encounters with orbital debris requiring evasive action. Three of these near-misses occurred in 2020. In May this year there was a hit: a tiny piece of space junk punched a 5mm hole in the ISS’s Canadian-built robot arm. This week’s incident involved a piece of debris from the defunct…

The metaverse is a virtual world in which users, represented by an avatar, can shop, socialise, take part in leisure activities – and learn. Its development has become a priority for many tech companies, including Facebook (which recently changed its company name to Meta) and Microsoft. In a recent video presentation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the ways in which the metaverse would supposedly revolutionise life. Education was a key focus. Learning would become an immersive experience. By donning glasses or a headset, students could virtually “teleport” to any place or time. They could bring any object – a planet, a human organ,…

Facebook has announced that it will stop using its facial recognition system – the artificial intelligence software which recognises people in photos and videos and generates suggestions about who to “tag” in them. Facial recognition systems, like Facebook’s, identify people by matching faces to digital representations of faces stored on a database. Facebook has more than a billion of these representations on file but now says it will delete them. This announcement came barely a week after Facebook’s parent company rebranded itself from Facebook to Meta. The name change reflects the company’s focus on the “metaverse”, a vision for the internet which uses…