Cissé, Moustapha

Impact on the world

Recruited by Google to establish its first African engineering and AI research center, Cissé built the Accra facility from 2018 into a hub producing region-specific machine learning research — models for AI diagnosis of tuberculosis, crop-disease detection for farmers, and natural language processing for African languages designed to work despite the data scarcity and infrastructure gaps most global AI models ignore. He simultaneously founded and continues to direct the African Master's of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) program at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the first graduate-level AI program on the continent, training successive cohorts of African machine learning researchers. After leaving Google in 2022, he founded Kera Health Platforms in 2023, an AI-powered platform connecting healthcare providers and communities across Africa, motivated in part by his own near-fatal medical misdiagnosis as a teenager.

Life & background

Born around 1985 in Saint-Louis, Senegal, Cissé studied mathematics and physics at the Université Gaston Berger before moving to Paris, where a lack of comparable African graduate programs led him to earn a master's in artificial intelligence (2010) and a PhD in computer science (2014) from Université Pierre et Marie Curie. He joined Facebook AI Research in Paris in 2016 as a research scientist before Google recruited him in 2018 to lead its new Accra AI center, a role he held until his departure in 2022. He has published widely in machine learning with more than 20,000 academic citations, and continues to split his work between Kera Health and his professorship and AMMI directorship at AIMS.

Sources

1. iAfrica.com; Tech In Africa; We Are Tech Africa; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; Jeune Afrique