Developing and Deploying End‐to‐End Machine Learning Systems for Social Impact: A Rubric and Practical Artificial Intelligence Case Studies From African Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have demonstrated the potential to provide solutions to societal challenges, for example, automated crop diagnostics for smallholder farmers, environmental pollution modelling and prediction for cities and machine translation systems for languages that enable information access and communication for segments of the population who are unable to speak or write official languages, among others. Despite the potential of AI, the practical and technical issues related to its development and deployment in the African context are the least documented and understood. The development and deployment of AI for social impact systems in the developing world present new intricacies and requirements emanating from the unique technology and social ecosystems in these settings. This paper provides a rubric for developing and deploying AI systems for social impact with a focus on the African context. The rubric is derived from the analysis of a series of selected real‐world case studies of AI applications in Africa. We assessed the selected AI case studies against the proposed rubric. The rubric and examples of AI applications presented in this paper are expected to contribute to the development and application of AI systems in other African contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".