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.
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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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Small Language Models: Notes from the past couple of weeks 🤖🤯
The past few days have brought interesting developments in small language models that could expand mobile computing and low-resource environment applications. Here’s what caught my attention: • Microsoft’s Phi was made fully open source (MIT license) and has been improved by Unsloth AI. 🚀🔓 Blog: https://unsloth.ai/blog/phi4 • Kyutai Labs based in Paris 🇫🇷 introduced Helium-1…
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Pastra – A Practical Guide to the Gemini Multimodal Live API
Google’s Gemini Multimodal Live API provides developers with tools to build AI applications that process and respond to real-time multimodal input (audio, video, and text). Heiko Hotz, a Gemini expert at Google, has created a project called Pastra, a comprehensive guide to help developers get started with this technology. What the guide covers: Getting started…
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Singapore Launches MERaLiON: Speech Recognition and Multimodal LLM for Multilingual Applications
A public institution in Singapore 🇸🇬 🚀 , as part of a national effort to advance AI capabilities , has just released a speech recognition model and a multimodal large language model (LLM) tailored to Singapore’s multilingual landscape. The MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder is a speech foundation model designed to support downstream speech applications. Researchers built this model…