Africa-Canada AI & Data Innovation Consortium

Pleased to share our new work on Digital One Health / One Digital Health. Our analysis maps emerging trends & future directions at the intersection of human, animal, environmental, and digital health. Grateful to @IDRC_CRDI for supporting this work Link: tinyurl.com/2j22b7sc

Our Executive Director @dzevela will be giving a keynote tonight at the BrainSTEM Alliance and NSBE Professionals Innovators in STEAM Event at the University of Toronto! Title: “From Community Problems to Co-Created Solutions: The Black AI Innovation Approach.”

One year ago Canada launched Canada’s Africa Strategy: A Partnership for Shared Prosperity and Security. Great to see the strategy moving into implementation with engagement of African diaspora Thks to Hon. @Rob_Oliphant for his leadership in advancing Canada–Africa relations.

Our Executive Director, Prof. Jude Kong, delivered a keynote at the University of Saskatchewan Black History Month Research Symposium 2026. From village pathways to AI-driven health systems innovation — and youth programs like Agentic AI & Ask a Black Mathematician.

February Spotlight #5 🦠🧠 Our new paper benchmarks ChatGPT-4o, Grok, Gemini 1.5 Pro & DeepSeek R1 for avian flu risk communication + real-time decision support across stakeholder scenarios. Big promise—needs role-aware evaluation. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

New publication! Our study shows that behavioural change + targeted vaccination can significantly reduce mpox transmission in the DRC — with vaccination of children having the greatest impact. Read more: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

📢 New publication! Our modeling study shows that pre-exposure vaccination in high-risk populations is key to preventing mpox resurgence in Canada. Without it, mpox could become endemic. Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.118…

New paper: How are #DigitalHealth & #OneHealth converging in the Global South? Using a gender-sensitive Delphi + latent semantic analysis, we identify structural drivers, emerging issues & overlooked weak signals shaping future health governance. 🔗 jmir.org/2026/1/e78702/

📘 New chapter: Bridging the AI Divide in Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Multidisciplinary Applications. Advancing equitable access to compute & data. Grateful to @IDRC_CRDI@IDRC_CRDI @IDRC_CRDI for the support. 🔗 link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…

New publication 🚨 AI-driven ST-CAN for high-resolution methane prediction, validated in the Athabasca oil sands region. More accurate, robust, and interpretable climate monitoring. Link: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Thanks to @NSERC_CRSNG #AI #Methane #ClimateTech

A pleasure to host Ms. Joo-hyung Hong from the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare We discussed AI work across DLSPH (incl. AIMMLab) improving patient care & safety, and AI deployed in Canadian hospitals to identify high-risk patients. Welcome to Canada 🇨🇦

🚨 New Publication: We show how web-based, environmental & climatic data + historical cases improve early warning of avian influenza in Canada using deep learning. GRU models were most accurate; Facebook activity & temperature also key. 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/2…

🚨 New Preprint | AI-Powered Mosquito Surveillance 🦟Vector-borne diseases cause 700k+ deaths/yr, hitting low-resource regions hardest We present MosquitoTrack: a low-cost, AI-enabled IoT system for real-time, offline mosquito surveillance using acoustic & environmental sensing

ACADIC is at Caltech this week for the @AIM_Sciences  Workshop on Formal Scientific Modeling: A Case Study in Global Health. We look forward to contributing to interdisciplinary efforts that advance data-driven modeling approaches for addressing complex global health challenges

ACADIC was delighted to welcome Luke Shankland, CEO of Aviro Health, to our Secretariat today. Our Executive Director, Prof. Jude Kong, had the pleasure of hosting the visit and leading discussions on collaboration in Point-of-Need technologies.

New preprint: Equity-first governance for LLMs in digital health. We audited LLaMA-3.2, Mistral-7B & DeepSeek (450 culturally grounded prompts, FNMWCF). Takeaway: technical adequacy ≠ equitable adequacy. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… #DigitalHealth #HealthEquity #ResponsibleAI

🧬 New preprint out! HPAI in Canada 🇨🇦We identify national & local HPAI hotspots using spatial analysis + ML. Key drivers include waterfowl density, poultry premises, vegetation & air quality—supporting targeted, risk-based surveillance. Link: tinyurl.com/2xm2rf39

As the world marks Universal Health Coverage Day, our Director @dzevela will be joining colleagues and national leaders tomorrow to discuss how artificial intelligence and community resilience can strengthen the pathway toward achieving universal health coverage in the DRC.

Meeting with Global Affairs Canada – Central, Southern & Eastern Africa Bureau! ACADICis grateful to the Global Affairs Canada Canada – Central, Southern and Eastern Africa Bureau for an insightful and energizing meeting.

Grateful to @IDRC_CRDI for the opportunity to join the 2025 Annual Public Meeting. Our ED @dzevela & AI4PEP South Africa Director Prof. Mellado spoke on a panel about how locally led research drives impact—highlighting Southern leadership, evidence-to-action, & resilient futures