Interview with Abdulrauf Remi Abdulganiu
Who are you and what is your professional background?
Okay. I am a software engineer and I am also learning to become a machinery engineer or AI engineer.
But I have a background with Data Analysis and Machine Learning Engineering.
Basically I love to… to solve problems with my skills.
What made you decide to take part in the Robot in Residence Project?
Growing up I’ve always loved to engineer products or to build something for my own use.
So when I was growing up I realized that if I build for my own use, at least I should do something other people can benefit from.
So doing that, I realized that not only one particular skill… You don’t need any particular skills to … at least if you the skill, if you have other skills to combine them to make it perfect …
So for the Robot in Residency, I’ve… I’ve always loved automation.
So when I saw the opportunity I realized that let me try to apply my skills, learning on the machine engineering for the robot to do some stuffs, to help the people around it.
So because mostly when we look at
What cultural skills of Ghana do you want to teach NAO?
Okay, first of all the robot is to… I’m programming it to be a medical assistant.
Putting the Ghanaian culture in mind, would love to… I’ll programme it to understand the Ghanaian language. Because mostly, when you look at those who are, the elderly people, mostly not all of them understand the English language. Also to… although people can speak the English just that some of them, there are some things that if you uhm… when something is wrong with you, it is better explained in your language than using another uhm… language to explain.
For the people to understand the language well it will be an advantage for it because people were able to express whatever is wrong with them for them to get their results or their problem solved.
What was your first contact with Nao like and what difficulties did you encounter?
Okay… uhm… the first time I had contact with NAO, I really don’t know because I really don’t know anything about it and I have to know how does he work. Even getting to know how to connect … the IP address of the robot, it’s not kind of easy. Most of the language they use is old generational language, like the Python 2, mostly I always work with the Python 3.
Having to work… to go back and generally some codes in Python 2 is kind of challenging. That is for the NAO Robot and most the things the way they structure their data structure is confusing to understand. If you don’t have that knowledge in Python.
What has the overall experience in the Robot in Residency program been like for you?
Okay… I’ll say the overall experience has been so grateful… so helpful and very impactful because here are some things that although I knew how to uhm… to look through them, to get better understanding of them. And it has really thought me a lot of things because here are certain things I’ve never even come across with but working with NAO I’ve get to know some things that are really helpful in the computer science industry. It has really thought me other aspects that if something is not working right; I can always switch to other things, to make it work. For example as I was saying, the Robot is basically working on Python 2, I’ve not worked with Python 2. So working with Python 2 I have the… the basic skills in Python because ehm… Python 3 is built on Python 2 so you get the basic understanding on how to… use some basic computer science skills you can get.
So it’s been really helpful. I really enjoyed this.