Local realities.
WHAT THE OPPORTUNITIES ARE
Problems with local data nobody else has addressed Fintech, agriculture, logistics, health and education applications Language technology for local languages Remote work for international employers
WHAT THE CONSTRAINTS ARE
Hardware cost and availability Cloud billing in foreign currency Connectivity for large data transfer Power stability for long training runs Fewer local senior practitioners to learn from
WHAT THAT ARGUES FOR
Transfer learning over training from scratch Smaller models Careful cost management Cloud capacity rented rather than hardware purchased
WHAT DATA CHALLENGES ARE DISTINCTIVE
Less digitised historical data Inconsistent records Address and identity data that is difficult to standardise Languages and varieties poorly represented in models
WHAT THAT LAST POINT MEANS
Systems must be evaluated locally, and frequently adapted.
WHY THAT IS ALSO AN OPPORTUNITY
Work on under-represented languages and local problems is genuinely novel.
WHAT TO BUILD
Things solving problems here, with data from here.
WHAT TO JOIN
Local practitioner communities, which exist and are growing.
WHAT TO BE REALISTIC ABOUT
That most local demand is for applied work, not research.
