Applied artificial intelligence, kept close to practice: what these systems do well, where they break, and how to build with them so the result works outside a demo.
2 posts
Part one argued that Africa's cell towers could be a data centre spread across the land. This part asks the obvious next question: where are they? Using open, crowdsourced data on 565,000 mobile cells, it maps South Africa and the continent, finds that the towers follow the people and the roads, and shows why a map of people and a map of land tell two very different stories.
Google, SpaceX and others are putting computers in orbit because power and cooling on Earth have run out of room. Africa has no space programme, but it has tens of thousands of cell towers that already have power, batteries, cooling, a fence and a link to the network. This post asks whether those towers can be a data centre spread across the land, and answers with the same graph and scoring method I used to send generators to towers during load shedding.