Ethiopian Geniuses who makes their own Terminators

The black-and-white robot stopped and its eyes, two small red lights, suddenly lit up. Rotating 

about 90 degrees, it recognized the blue plastic ball a few centimeters away, came forward and kicked it. "The robot is Chinese, but the processor is made in Ethiopia," Getnet Aseffa explains. "A student developed it, and within a few months we will organize the first national football competition between robots, in the same vein as the International RoboCup tournament!"  

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ome to the iCog Labs experiment room in the heart of Addis Ababa's university district. Getnet Aseffa, 28, is one of the brains behind the operation. After graduating in computer science in 2012, this avid reader of futurist author Ray Kurzweil co-created iCog with the help of American researcher Ben Goertzel. It is the first Ethiopian research and development laboratory specializing in artificial intelligence.

"Our programmers have the same skills as Chinese, Americans and Europeans," Aseffa says. "The only difference is the economic gap and the daily challenges that we face." Among them are lack of infrastructure, erratic Internet access and frequent power cuts. "At the beginning, developers were losing hundreds of lines of code," he says. "Now, they back up data almost every minute." For greater security, the laboratory's servers are located in Germany. Like the U.S. company Hanson Robotics, which created the humanoid robot named Han that's able to recognize and imitate human facial expressions, iCog works for foreign customers. Ethiopian developers are in charge of improving image recognition software and other items to improve robot intelligence. On behalf of Californian companies, other lab employees are working on genetic mapping of human genes related to aging in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of longevity.
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