Mr. Darlington Akogo

Darlington Akogo is a global leader in Artificial Intelligence. He's the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at minoHealth AI Labs; an AI Healthtech company; karaAgro AI; an AI-powered Plant & Pest Disease Detection and Precision Agriculture platform, Runmila AI Institute; an AI and Data Science training institute, and Gudra AI Studio; an organization broadly exploring AI 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 AI 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 AI 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 (AI) 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, Bill & 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 AI Labs and other organizations, with prior funding from UKRI. He served as the co-chair of the Digital Health & AI Global Health Strategy Group, created by University of Oxford and 13 partners from around the world including minoHealth AI 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 AI4Cashew project. KaraAgro AI 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 AI in collaboration with Makerere AI Lab (Makerere University). He serves as the Director for another Lacuna Fund project in health under the title, Datasets for AI-Based Diagnosis of Malaria, which is a collaboration between Makerere AI Lab (Makerere University) and MinoHealth AI Lab. He serves as the AI 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 (IDRC) and GIZ. He served as the Lead (Ghana) for the Lacuna Fund project, Crop Disease & Pest Image Data, by Makerere University and KaraAgro AI, 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.