Bio
Abdoulaye Diack is a strategic leader with over 20 years of experience in engineering and management, including AI/ML research , research operations, mobile financial services, payments, and big data solutions.
For the past 6 years, Abdoulaye has worked as a Program Manager in AI research, first at Google Brain and then at Google Research Africa. During this time, he has been in a unique position to see the rapid advancements in AI being applied in the real world.
A core focus of his work has been the Open Buildings project, a pioneering AI initiative that has revolutionized mapping in underrepresented regions. This project has successfully mapped over 1.8 billion buildings across the Global South, improving Google Maps’ coverage in these areas. The resulting open data has become a useful for local governments and organizations, enabling more effective urban planning, disaster response, and economic development strategies.
Interests:
- Research + innovation + startups in Africa
- Digital transformation & AI Africa Ecosystem
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TxGemma Release: AI Models for Therapeutics Development
Google DeepMind has released TxGemma, a set of open-weight AI models designed for therapeutic development. These models, based on the Gemma architecture, are trained to analyze and predict characteristics of therapeutic entities during drug discovery.
The release includes ‘chat’ variants (9B and 27B) that can engage in dialogue and provide explanations for their predictions.…
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Gemma 3: Massive Context, 35+ Languages, and Multimodal Capabilities
Gemma 3 is out! It’s a family of open AI models (1B-27B parameters) featuring a 128k token context window (can work with very long documents and conversations), multilingual support (35+ languages, trained on 140+), and single GPU/TPU compatibility. I’m excited about its potential to increase accessibility to advanced AI models, especially in resource-constrained settings,…
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Spatial Queries on Hout Bay Data Using Gemini ‘s DataScience Agent
I tested the Gemini Datascience agent with the Hout Bay (Cape Town, South Africa) building data footprint, asking simple spatial questions, “show me small houses” and “identify crowded areas” “what about large houses with few neighbors”. The agent generates interesting visualizations and can select various algorithms, for example it picked k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) to detect houses with…
