1) Motivation

In 2017, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs reported a world population of 7.6
billions. By the year 2050, this figure is expected to leap to 9.8 billions.
Africa will represent more than 50% of that growth with a 2017 population of 1.3 billion projected
to reach 2.5 billions. Africa’s population explosion is concentrated in areas in which corruption
belies the very potential for scalable and sustainable development. The Sela Protocol efficiently
and effectively connects pools of capital with entrepreneurs that need them most and create
feedback loops connecting beneficiaries with funders to ensure transparency, accountability.

2) Sela Platform Overview

A project’s progress and associated milestones are visually tracked in the Sela Portal.
The portal includes three sub-modules for each Agent type:
1. Funding Agent Interface: to fund projects on the Sela Platform, set timelines and verification
parameters, receive and digest updates from the ground, satellites as well as analytics on these
data
2. Service Agent Interface: to initiate projects for funding, register claims of completion and
requests for extension
3. Evaluation Agent interface: to upload data answer query on project progress and local
information.

The Sela Portal enables a open communication across stakeholders throughout a project’s life
cycle powering the development of a trust economy.

3) Problem discovery process

A) Designing for the next billion internet users: the need for voice-first interfaces
In ​pilot tests​ conducted in Spring 2018, it became apparent that some of our evaluation agents
encountered difficulties using our text-based interface to upload project claims, answer
questions and spell passwords. Further research proved that this is not an isolated issue as
close to ​40​% of the adult population in Nigeria is illiterate.
Google is ​leading​ the way in India to design interfaces for such population with their “next billion
users” initiative. In the blog post, they note that “​many of India’s new internet users favor
listening and speaking over reading text.” Our team made similar observations in Nigeria as
illiteracy prevents users from entering password information, answer questions and manage
their funds. New approaches are needed to design for such users.

B) Integrating complementary data sources: Satellite Imagery

Besides designing voice-first interfaces, a frequent question coming up in our work is around the
validity and quality of data submitted by such users. For example, our first projects involve oil
spill cleanups and require users to upload geotagged pictures of rivers, lakes. While one
approach to solve that problem is to create constraints and requiring users to upload
geolocated, time stamped data; another one strengthening this approach is to use
complementary data sources not requiring any users input.Recent articles point at the use of
satellite imagery​ as a tool to use to monitor development project progress. Companies such as
Planet Labs​ are creating an ecosystem of hundreds of satellites taking daily pictures of the
planet with a 3 meters resolution. The data and information available is immense and can be
leveraged to track the execution of development projects, be they infrastructure projects, oil
cleanups, building of roads, schools.

C) Enforcing identity through biometrics

Users of the Sela platform earn a reputation by uploading claims, executing projects and
providing services to other users. In addition, they need to authenticate themselves to perform
financial transactions. As said before, designing for illiterate users suggest we need to go
beyond private keys and passwords and look at biometrics as authentication mechanisms.
Performing a cost-benefit analysis of biometrics solutions can inform the design of our platform.

We will now describe four sample projects inspired by our learnings and needs.

4) Projects

A) Project 1: Combined speaker & speech recognition for data submission (Speaker &
Speech Recognition)
For data submission, the typical workflow for an evaluation agent is receiving a notification or
trigger prompting them to go on a given site which they will be familiar with and answer a series
of questions.
For example, a woman living in K-Dere in the Niger Delta can be prompted to go inspect a
school or road construction, take pictures, indicate which task the media corresponds to and
answer a series of follow up questions which at the beginning will include:
1) Yes/no questions
2) Numerical answers
3) Narrative answers
In that process, instructions can either be given in English or local language and answers can
also be given in English and tribal languages.
For English questions and answers, field experiments with readily available speech recognition
engine can be made by the Sela team to test their error rate.
The scope of this project includes creating combined speaker & speech recognition engine to be
deployed on cheap Android smartphones for specific numeric and binary keywords spoken with
non english accents as well as local languages such as :
● Pidgin
● Yoruba
● Igbo
● Hausa
● Ogoni
The scope of the project will include:
● Exploration of existing data sets for our needs
● Approaches needed to collect additional data
● Quantifying added value of directly learning from the data captured as well as
approaches such as transfer learning to combine big and small data from other
languages
● Field testing of the speech recognition engines in collaboration with the Sela team
● Quantifying robustness and ease of spoofing of speaker recognition models

B) Project 2: Biometrics landscape analysis (Biometrics & Cryptography)

In some workflows, it is important for users to authenticate. In a crucial one such as initiating a
blockchain transaction, we are interested in exploring how biometrics-managed wallets can
work to enable Sela users to sign their transaction with their biometrics. The project can be
broken down in three aspects:
1) Quantifying error rates and performing a cost-benefit analysis of various biometric
solutions including
a) 3D vein
b) Facial recognition
c) Voice recognition
d) Fingerprint recognition
2) Quantifying ease of spoofing of each of the aforementioned biometric solutions
3) Understanding how to use biometric identifiers as a means of authentication for mobile
wallets and how to store the biometric information in a secure way

C) Project 3: Computer Vision for oil pollution assessment (Computer Vision)

Many companies are gathering daily pictures of the earth and creating strategic data which can
be used by governments to track development outcomes, monitor population and city growth. In
this project, we are interested in using computer vision & satellite imagery to identify areas
suffering from oil pollution. Unresolved ​oil spills​ are a major problem in the Niger Delta. Since
1960s there has been thousands of oil spills throughout the region.
Understanding the spatial extent and level of oil spill pollution is a major challenge to figure out
where to deploy capital and track the progress. The ​UNEP​ report gives highly granular details
about the level of oil pollutions in this region of Nigeria.
Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon measurements have been conducted in a dozen of sites across
the Niger Delta in 2012.It included many effort intensive process to gather data at various
locations and perform chemical test quantifying the level of pollution.
In this project, we’re interested in learning how to extrapolate from this survey and build models
helping to systematically identify areas suffering from oil spills using satellite imagery. This will
help to identify areas/villages where oil pollution is happening and create another data source to
track it over time. The problem can be broken down into two sub-problems of increasing
difficulty:
 ● A classification of a region as polluted by oil or not
● A prediction from satellite image to oil pollution level
Oil pollution in the region has distinct spatial features and effect on the vegetation which can
likely be leveraged in building our models.
Data modalities include such as Google Earth, Planet labs, SAR and Hyperspectral images are
to be investigated and augmented with on the ground lab measurements to go from perception
to prediction.

D) Project 4: Accent-based speech synthesis (Speech Synthesis)

In some use cases, the prompts will also have to be read in English or local languages.
In the spirit of inclusive innovation, another project can explore “accent transfer” to synthesize
voices closer at mimicking non standard english accents.
Recent work such as Wavenet as well as ​Lyrebird.ai ​ open the door to better text to speech
engines. However, in the majority of cases, the speech synthesized tend to have standard
english accent. In this research project, we want to be able to “transfer” accent. The scope of
the work includes :

1) Finding data sources of english sentences produced with a Nigerian accent

2) Finding and/or creating data sources of sentences spoken in local dialects with local
accent
3) Parametrizing or creating spoken word models with latent variables accounting for
different accent
4) Finding metric or paradigm to give feedback on how close to the target accent a given
sentence is
5) Learning generative models of english sentences spoken with different accent
6) Learning generative models of local dialects spoken with local accent