The community of Kamangu, Kiambu County, Kikuyu grew up along the A104 NW out of Nairobi and lies in the incredible Rift Valley. Local people are relatively well off if they have a smartphone. Most struggle to buy kerosene for lamps to light their homes at night because…. No electricity. Yeah!?

They are blessed, however, with Africa’s best mobile network and constant sunshine (except for the two annual rainy seasons). Internet.org and Facebook are doing their best to connect people too, even those with text-only phones. There are also internet cafes - for those that can afford the rates of $0.30 an hour. Or 30 Kenyan shillings. Or 22 pence!

One of the first of many computing terms we learn is the most powerful one. RECURSION; “..an infinite number of actions defined by a finite recursive program“. But what is the program?

Tech infrastructure is economically trivial and is recursively becoming more and more ubiquitous but it is people that create its real impact. Even the world’s most advanced AI today can’t function without its fellow human. And if the 30+ million Kenyans currently without power went to their local polytechnics or internet cafes and learnt to code…that’s the program! “Teaching people to program” - in a feasible, practical way. It costs just $30 to fund someone for 6 hrs a day, 5 days a week for 4 weeks, to learn from the best; Andrew Ng‘s Coursera, Udacity, Harvard, the Khan Academy, Code.org.

My “How-To“ on deep learning is now complete. Supported by Facebook and NVIDIA, the report is an empirical study of the field concentrating on GPU tech & convolutional neural networks, with full install details of state-of-the-art code. I‘ll be happy to share the report ………. for a small donation to my sustainable development charity AVIF. Your money will go towards teaching people to code, alongside Wolfram, World Possible, Raspberry Pi and other supporters.

“..the Raspberry Pi is only the second computer ever on which Mathematica has been bundled for free use. The first was Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer in 1988. A gaggle of NeXT computers were bought by CERN for physicists to run Mathematica—but ended up being diverted to invent the web. What will be done with the millions of instances of the Wolfram Language that are bundled on Raspberry Pi computers around the world? Maybe some amazing and incredibly important invention will be made with them. Maybe some kid somewhere will be inspired, and will go on to change the world. But one thing is clear: with the Wolfram Language on Raspberry Pi we’ve got a new path for learning programming—and connecting it to the real world—that a great many people are going to be able to benefit from. And I am very pleased to have been able to do my part to make this happen“; Stephen Wolfram, 2013

If you want to get involved to spread code around, please contact me for more details.

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