Come frantumare quantità di stereotipi e pregiudizi con una foto e poche risposte a una splendida intervista di Dionne Searcey sul New York Times di alcuni giorni fa.
Lei è Rokhaya Diagne e a 25 anni, premiata per i suoi progetti che applicano l'Intelligenza Artificiale a problemi di salute pubblica come la malaria è pronta vederne i risultati e a farsi mentore.
Da adolescente andava nella stanza del fratello per videogiocare online ore e ore. Tanto che sua madre le diceva 'hai una dipendenza, se non smetti ti porto da psichiatra'.
Lei a continuato e con Call of Duty & co. ha migliorato le sue capacità di risoluzione dei problemi.
Ha approfittato dei tanti corsi online gratuiti offerti da università statunitensi per rafforzare le competenze tecniche e informatiche. Ha cambiato percorso di studi, da biologia a bioinformatica e oltre.
When she was in her early teens, Rokhaya Diagne would retreat to her brother’s room, where she played online computer games for hours, day after day, until her mother finally got fed up.
“My mom said, ‘This is an addiction,’” Ms. Diagne said. “She said if I didn’t stop, she would send me to the hospital to see a psychiatrist.”
Her mother’s interventions worked. While Ms. Diagne’s passion for computers has, if anything, intensified, she has redirected her energies to higher pursuits than leveling up at Call of Duty.
Now, her goals include using artificial intelligence to help the world eradicate malaria by 2030, a project she is focused on at her health start-up.
Video games “taught me a lot of things,” said Ms. Diagne, 25, a Senegalese computer science major who lives in Dakar, the capital. “They gave me problem-solving skills.”
“I don’t regret playing those things,” she added.
The wealth of free online coding boot camps, robotics lessons and lectures from the likes of Stanford, Oxford and M.I.T. are having a big impact across Africa, inspiring careers in engineering and seeding ideas for start-ups.
A lot of people are reaching out to me, saying, ‘how did you do this, how did you do that,’” she said. “I can mentor them and show them the way.”
