Ben Cole has written about his work as a technology pioneer in Africa.
One of the recently announced Gates scholars has written about his work as a Google technology pioneer in Africa for the prestigious Huffington Post.
Ben Cole [2011], who will take up an award to do an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science in the autumn, wrote about his experience of working to promote technology in Africa and specifically helping to get small businesses online. He says the Huffington Post got in touch after reading his personal blog.
Ben, who has been based in Africa for the past seven months, became a technology pioneer after previously travelling to Africa and after spending internships with Google. He had taken a course in African development at Cornell University, but says that “besides that, it’s been a sharp departure from my previous academic work, which focused on human-computer interaction, computational sociology, and web software development”.
He would love to continue this kind of work while he is at Cambridge. “My original research proposal was to create a system that allowed for machine translation of African languages over low-end phones,” he says. “The specifics may change, but I definitely plan to work on something internationally based with a strong social aspect.”
He will stay in Africa for the next five months before he comes to Cambridge.
