UNILAG to set up grants for students in entrepreneurship

The Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, on Thursday said that the university was setting up grants between N1 million and N2 million to aid students in entrepreneurship.

Ogundipe made this known at the 3rd Biennial Conference on TOKI (Transition from Observation to Knowledge to Intelligence) held in Lagos.

Our correspondent reports that the conference is backed by the University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University and Data Science Nigeria.

TOKI is the Biennial forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in knowledge management, Competitive Intelligence, Big Data, Semantic Web, IOT, Resource Management, Web Mining, Natural Language Processing, Interoperable and Adaptive Information Systems and Data Science.

According to him, the grant is in support of the Bank of Industry.

“Students of the institution are full with brilliant ideas and there is need to tap into these ideas to bring it to life.

“There is need to develop their skills which will lead to innovation and then to entrepreneurship; and when it comes to entrepreneurship, we will help them register these companies,’’ he said.

The vice chancellor said that presently the authorities had sent information to students in every field to bring out their brilliant ideas that could be commercialised and had up to 5,000 students.

Ogundipe said that the main objective of the grant was to ensure that students are not pushed out into the world where unemployment exists.

The vice chancellor said that the university had started running programmes on the campus to help students to have the needed skills to be able to compete favourably with their counterparts.

“These students need to be exposed early to have industrial experience. They will be mentored to have the skills to enable them to be relevant locally and internationally.

“We also encourage the students to always visit the entrepreneurship centre as they will attend to their needs,’’ he said.

A Software Engineer, Mr Emeka Okoye, from Cymantiks Ltd., said that it was unfortunate that the country was surrounded by nature and we did not want to find out what was unique in our nature.

He called on the students to tap into using artificial intelligence to understand the environment and get new knowledge to improve on a lot of things.

“Augmented Intelligence should be the main focus for the country, a focus where using machine as an assistance rather than it replacing human beings,’’ he said.

He pointed out that there was the need to create opportunities to take Artificial Intelligence very seriously in the country.

Okoye noted that researching into the environment would give the students the necessary avenue to carve out niches for themselves.

He discussed on the topic “Machine Augmenting Human Knowledge and Intelligence with Knowledge Graph’’.

Dr Victor Odunmuyiwa, Director, Centre for Information Technology and System, University of Lagos, said that there was need to create an ecosystem that would forge the country ahead.

According to him, the take home at the end of the conference is to have a cluster of researchers, come up with people that are experts.

He noted that effective decision making by augmented knowledge is essential, saying that augmented knowledge had to do with promoting human-machine intelligence.