Nothing is impossible. If you can think of it, you can achieve it. Meet Nigerian Scientist who didn’t just think about the idea but reproduced a device that thinks like a human.
Agabi had his Ordinary National Diploma at Federal College of Fisheries and Marine Technology. He further studied Theoretical and Mathematical Physics during his first degree at the University of Lagos. He also had his second-degree education at Umea University in statistical learning.
Agabi entered the labour market as a Robotics Engineer in Zurich, Switzerland. He has since built and programmed pick and phase robots.
As a person passionate about leading a better world, Agba has led a team of industry experts and academics to develop an in vitro reflex arc for modeling implantable neutral chips at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich. The project recorded great success.
He was at some point a visiting scholar at MRC (London Institute of Medical Sciences, Hammersmith). While on his Ph.D. studies at Imperial College in London, as a Computational Neuroscientist and Engineer, he also built and customized two-photon microscopes for studying synaptic transmission in the mouse’s visual cortex.
Oshiorenoya Agabi is currently the CEO of Koniku Inc.
In 2017, Agabi speaking at a gathering which brought together 700 elites from all over the world, the renowned TEDGlobal conference in Arusha, Tanzania, to discuss Africa’s next big leap in technology, science, and politics, says that artificial intelligence will ultimately be accomplished by the exclusive use of actual biological neurons. He admonished that instead of copying them, we need to take them and engineer them in order to build computers that think or work as humans do.
“Biology is technology,” he said. “Biology has the most extensive open-source hardware and software,” he added.
The role of artificial intelligence and what the creation of humanoid devices will mean for the future of the human race has proved contentious over the years. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has even spoken of humans evolving into cyborgs, starting a medical research company Neuralink that aims to embed electrodes in people’s brains. The ethical decision-making of connected devices has also raised questions over how to program machines and whether humans can trust machines with moral decisions.
Conclusively, Agabi says the world should deploy as many resources to develop devices that would solve global problems like terrorism or cancer. Additionally, he said, Koniku, his founding platform, was already building an assembly line for combining biological machines with silicon devices and creating an entirely new class of devices, and a new market. Agabi said that major brands were already using his technology, with the company’s current $8 million revenue, expected to increase to $30 million in 2018. The eventual goal was to build a cognitive system based on living neurons within 5 to 7 years.
“This is a world-first,” Agabi said.
One year later, true to his words, this device was launched.
With all of these outstanding records, Oshiorenoya Agabi can conveniently be addressed as a Silicon Valley-based neurotechnology entrepreneur.
