KNUST tips ‘1st-year’ OWASS NSMQ contestant to win 30th NSMQ

Kwame Nkrumah Univesity of Science and Technology (KNUST) ahead of the 2023 National Science and Maths Quiz grand finale has wished Stephen Apemah-Baah, a first-year student contestant for Opoku Ware School (OWASS) in the competition good luck.

KNUST’s bet comes after the 2023 NSMQ finalist won the 2022 edition of the Junior Science and Maths Quiz (JSMQ) organised by the College of Science of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

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“After winning the 2022 edition of the Junior Science and Maths Quiz jsmq_gh organised by the College of Science of KNUST, Stephen Apemah-Baah ( formerly of Good Shepherd R/C JHS) becomes the first form-one student to lead Opoku Ware School to the finals of the National Science and Maths Quiz happening today, “KNUST said in a post.

In other news, the producer of the NSMQ, Primetime Limited says Artificial Intelligence dubbed Brilla AI will unofficially compete with contestants of the Senior High Schools to participate in the grand finale of the 2023 National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ).

Brilla Al according to the organizer of the Science and Mathematics competition will battle remotely with PRESEC- Legon, Achimota School, and Opoku Ware School, at the riddles round of the final contest on Monday, October 30, 2023.

Built by Kwame AI, the AI will attempt to quickly and accurately provide an answer to a question with a Ghanaian accent. It consists of four distinct machine-learning systems (across NLP, speech processing, and Generative AI) working together in real time.

Head of the project, Dr. George Jojo Boateng said his outfit’s aim is for Brilla AI to compete in the National Science and Maths Quiz and win performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition

Asked how the Artificial Intelligence project works, he said “The app transcribes the voice of the quiz moderator into texts and lists the clues from the texts, which are then forwarded to the questions and answering feature of the app.”

“The AI then converts the answer to speech, replying to the riddle in a Ghanaian accent. The open-source project seeks to explore the potential of artificial intelligence in the national competition and in the education sector.

Aside from being a fun intellectual challenge, this work matters because there is much inequity in preparations for the NSMQ, a problem that is quite representative of the inequity in Ghana’s educational system where only the big-name schools almost always make it to the semis and finals,” George noted.