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https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-in-south-africa-affordable-new-devices-use-ai-to-monitor-hotspots-in-real-time-235897>
"Air quality has become one of the most important public health issues in
Africa. Poor air quality kills more people globally every year than HIV, TB and
malaria combined. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Air pollution makes
people less productive because they get headaches and feel tired.
India, for example, has poor air quality. The impact of India’s poor air
quality on its gross domestic product is about US$100 billion every year.
The health risks of poor air quality are known. But it’s always been costly to
set up monitoring stations to measure it regularly.
I am a particle physicist, and the director of the Institute for Collider
Particle Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand and the iThemba
Laboratories for Accelerator Based Sciences, a unit of South Africa’s National
Research Foundation. As part of our technology transfer activities, we launched
the South African Consortium of Air Quality Monitoring, a multidisciplinary
team of scientists with strong connections with policy makers and who are
interested in improving air quality in South Africa.
We decided to create, for the first time in South Africa, a cost effective air
quality monitoring system based on sensors, Internet of Things and Artificial
Intelligence. We have named this system Ai_r.
Our team of 25 people includes more than 20 years of experience as particle
physicists in working with sensors, communications and artificial intelligence.
In particle physics, we create complex systems with different technologies and
different disciplines. Particle physics includes electrical and information
engineering, data science and artificial intelligence, among others.
There are only 130 big air quality measuring stations in South Africa. They
only measure the air quality in the vicinity of the station. This is why we
need cost-effective, dense networks made up of Ai_r systems set up all around
these stations, to measure air quality in a much wider area.
Our vision is to place tens of thousands of these devices all over South
Africa."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
