5 Evil People Whose Past May Surprise You
9 years ago
We
both lived on the 400 series of Eni-Njoku Hostel in the University Of
Nigeria, Nsukka and all the while I knew him, Dubie as we call him back
then always cut the image of a boy on a mission
.
He was always focused and had a sense of direction. His tripodal
movements were Class+Hostel+ Fellowship and you can always predict
where his is headed each time you see him. When you see him hanging his
black and ash coloured knapsack bag, you knew he was off to lectures and
when you see him with his black medium-sized King James bible, you knew
he was headed for fellowship.
Throughout
my stay in Eni Njoku hostel, the only time I saw Dubie with a visitor
of the opposite sex was the day her elder sister Onyeka, also a student
of the UNN visited him. He was a soft spoken and likeable person. One
hot afternoon, his soft voice drew our attention as he was was bullied
by a notorious hostel inmate nicknamed "More Money". While we were
simmering with anger towards his attacker, there was little we could do
as nobody was willing to risk confronting "More Money" especially in
that fearful climate of cultist attacks we lived then. Doing so will
certainly be an invitation to disaster and all we could do was to
console him even as he kept bemoaning the fact that he was simply being
bullied for no just course.
Today
after those hustles and bustles of life as an undergraduate, Chidube
Ezeozue — who received his undergraduate degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Nigeria in 2008, followed by three
years of work at a software startup — has created an app, with his
brother, that crowdsources information about Nigerian power outages.
With the app, called NepaSituation,
people living in Nigeria can report outages. This data, when merged
into an algorithm developed by Ezeozue, can help Nigerians predict when
power outages may strike their neighborhoods, and how long those outages
might last.
“With
over 100 million cell phones in Nigeria, we knew it was an important
resource we could tap into,” Ezeozue says. “It took a while to come up
with this algorithm, because the outages are pretty randomized, and the
app is only as good as the number of people who enter outage data.”
But
Ezeozue has delved into more than just tracking the problem: He is also
working to address Nigeria’s chronic energy shortage.
“I
started a company that is working to provide solar electricity to
businesses and families at zero upfront cost,” Ezeozue says. The
company, SolarKobo,
was recently funded by a seed grant from MIT’s Legatum Center for
Development and Entrepreneurship, where Ezeozue is a fellow.
“Nigeria
has plenty of solar energy available … for as low as $25 a month, we
can make this resource available to those who are interested,” Ezeozue
adds.
When
he is not working toward the betterment of his homeland, Ezeozue
researches machine learning and prediction algorithms in the research
group of Una-May O’Reilly, a principal research scientist in MIT’s
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
“We
are trying to use medical data, such as blood-pressure levels, to
improve patient care,” Ezeozue says. “We observe states that patients’
[blood] pressure goes through and eventually we can predict what state
they will go to. These predictions help doctors determine what to expect
next.”
Ezeozue
is also passionate about education. Along with other Nigerian students
at MIT, Ezeozue has started two initiatives to encourage students in
Nigeria to pursue higher education outside the country.
In
one of these initiatives, which is aimed at high school students,
Ezeozue and Chika Ugboh, an MIT chemical engineering student, bought
preparatory materials and paid for a few students in one Nigerian school
to take the SAT. While this pilot, which was launched in 2011, was not
an unequivocal success, Ezeozue says, “We learned that simply providing
the materials isn’t enough — it has to be accompanied by mentoring and
training.” He and Ugboh are now working to assess how these Nigerian
students learn best.
The
second of these initiatives is aimed at Nigerian undergraduates:
Working through their own networks in Nigeria, Ezeozue and other MIT
graduate students are encouraging Nigerian undergraduates who might be
interested in postgraduate study abroad.
“The
goal is to build a generation of highly educated Nigerians who will
hopefully go back to build a better Nigeria,” Ezeozue says. “I plan to
eventually go back to Nigeria.”
For now, after graduating from MIT in June, Ezeozue will remain in Cambridge, working as a software engineer for Google.
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