Title: Interview with Dr. Tunde Adegbola, African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i) (eLA 2007)
Source: eLearning Africa News Portal
Publisher: ICWE GmbH
Date published: 2006
Date accessed: 22/07/2009
Type of information: web article
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
Tunde Adegbola is Executive Director of African Languages Technology Initiative, a research organisation with a mandate of making modern ICTs relevant to African languages. A person with a dual career – he is both a research scientist and a consulting engineer. Mr. Adegbola was involved in investigating the application of Cellular Automata Transforms (CAT) to psychoacoustic theory for the compression of digital audio.

His current research interests lie primarily in ICT for development and speech technologies, with particular interests in the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of African tone languages. Among his achievements as a consulting engineer is the design, supply, and installation of Africa Independent Television (AIT), as well as the design of Channels Television and MITV, all in Lagos, Nigeria.

As we go further into the information age, more and more human communication will be mediated by machines, and this will raise the demand, not only for humans to communicate through machines but also to communicate with machines. There is no reason whatsoever why we should be made to do this in English. In order to achieve these modes of communication in African languages however, there is a need to supplement the present objectives of the study of linguistics in African universities. Within the contexts of the linguistics of African languages, we need to develop frameworks and theories that can be passed on to and used by practitioners in Human Language Technology (HLT). To this end, Alt-i is involved in developing the relevant human and other intellectual resources to facilitate this process.