The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, has announced that the institution was establishing grants of 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.
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 Ogundipe, the grant is with the support of the Bank of Industry. He said: “Students of the institution are full of brilliant ideas and there is a need to tap into these ideas to bring it to life.
“There is a 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.
“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 the machine as assistance rather than it replacing human beings,’’ he said.
He pointed out that there was a need to create opportunities to take Artificial Intelligence very seriously in the country.
Dr Victor Odunmuyiwa, Director, Centre for Information Technology and System (CITS), UNILAG, said that there was a 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.
