George G Boateng

• ETH Zurich

Across the African continent, students grapple with various educational challenges, including limited access to essential resources such as computers, internet connectivity, reliable electricity, and a shortage of qualified teachers. Despite these challenges, recent advances in AI such as BERT, and GPT-4 have demonstrated their potential for advanc...

Background Technology has become an integral part of our everyday life, and its use to manage and study health is no exception. Romantic partners play a critical role in managing chronic health conditions as they tend to be a primary source of support. Objective This study tests the feasibility of using commercial wearables to monitor couples’ uni...

Can an AI win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ)? That is the question we seek to answer in the NSMQ AI project, an open-source project that is building AI to compete live in the NSMQ and win. The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compe...

BACKGROUND Technology has become an integral part of our everyday life, and its use to manage and study health is no exception. Romantic partners play a critical role in managing chronic health conditions as they tend to be a primary source of support. OBJECTIVE This study tests the feasibility of using commercial wearables to monitor couples’ uni...

Africa has a high student-to-teacher ratio which limits students' access to teachers for learning support such as educational question answering. In this work, we extended Kwame, our previous AI teaching assistant for coding education, adapted it for science education, and deployed it as a web app. Kwame for Science provides passages from well-cura...

There is a lack of enough qualified teachers across Africa which hampers efforts to provide adequate learning support such as educational question answering (EQA) to students. An AI system that can enable students to ask questions via text or voice and get instant answers will make high-quality education accessible. Despite advances in the field of...

Couples generally manage chronic diseases together and the management takes an emotional toll on both patients and their romantic partners. Consequently, recognizing the emotions of each partner in daily life could provide an insight into their emotional well-being in chronic disease management. The emotions of partners are currently inferred in th...

Couples generally manage chronic diseases together and the management takes an emotional toll on both patients and their romantic partners. Consequently, recognizing the emotions of each partner in daily life could provide an insight into their emotional well-being in chronic disease management. Currently, the process of assessing each partner's em...

Africa has a high student-to-teacher ratio which limits students' access to teachers. Consequently, students struggle to get answers to their questions. In this work, we extended Kwame, our previous AI teaching assistant, adapted it for science education, and deployed it as a web app. Kwame for Science answers questions of students based on the Int...

Dyadic interactions of couples are of interest as they provide insight into relationship quality and chronic disease management. Currently, ambulatory assessment of couples' interactions entails collecting data at random or scheduled times which could miss significant couples' interaction/conversation moments. In this work, we developed, deployed a...

Couples' relationships affect the physical health and emotional well-being of partners. Automatically recognizing each partner's emotions could give a better understanding of their individual emotional well-being, enable interventions and provide clinical benefits. In the paper, we summarize and synthesize works that have focused on developing and...

The human voice communicates emotion through two different types of vocalizations: nonverbal vocalizations (brief non-linguistic sounds like laughs) and speech prosody (tone of voice). Research examining recognizability of emotions from the voice has mostly focused on either nonverbal vocalizations or speech prosody, and included few categories of...

Automatic grading systems have been in existence since the turn of the half-century. Several systems have been developed in the literature with either static analysis and dynamic analysis or a hybrid of both methodologies for computer science courses. This paper presents AutoGrad, a novel portable cross-platform automatic grading system for graphic...

How romantic partners interact with each other during a conflict influences how they feel at the end of the interaction and is predictive of whether the partners stay together in the long term. Hence understanding the emotions of each partner is important. Yet current approaches that are used include self-reports which are burdensome and hence limi...

Many processes in psychology are complex, such as dyadic interactions between two interacting partners (e.g., patient-therapist, intimate relationship partners). Nevertheless, many basic questions about interactions are difficult to investigate because dyadic processes can be within a person and between partners, they are based on multimodal aspect...

BACKGROUND Older adults who engage in physical activity can reduce their risk of mobility and disability. Short amounts of walking can improve their quality of life, physical function, and cardiovascular health. Various programs have been implemented to encourage older adults to engage in physical activity, but sustaining their motivation continues...

Background: Older adults who engage in physical activity can reduce their risk of mobility impairment and disability. Short amounts of walking can improve quality of life, physical function, and cardiovascular health. Various programs have been implemented to encourage older adults to engage in physical activity, but sustaining their motivation co...

There is a burgeoning trend of smartphone ownership in Africa due to the low costs of Android smartphones and the global increase in social media usage. Building upon previous works that introduced a smartphone-based coding course to secondary and tertiary students in Ghana via an in-person program and an online course, this work introduced African...

Automatic grading systems have been in existence since the turn of the half-century. Several systems have been developed in the literature with either static analysis and dynamic analysis or a hybrid of both methodologies for computer science courses. This paper presents AutoGrad, a novel portable cross-platform automatic grading system for graphic...

Many processes in psychology are complex, such as dyadic interactions between two interacting partners (e.g. patient-therapist, intimate relationship partners). Nevertheless, many basic questions about interactions are difficult to investigate because dyadic processes can be within a person and between partners, they are based on multimodal aspects...

How romantic partners interact with each other during a conflict influences how they feel at the end of the interaction and is predictive of whether the partners stay together in the long term. Hence understanding the emotions of each partner is important. Yet current approaches that are used include self-reports which are burdensome and hence limi...

Code plagiarism in online courses gives a false idea of the performance of students. In 2020, we run a smartphone-based online coding course, SuaCode Africa 2.0 in which 27% of plagiarism cases was found in the final assignment submissions. Hence, a need arose to develop software that detects plagiarism among source code. The software described in...

Introductory hands-on courses such as our smartphone-based coding course, SuaCode require a lot of support for students to accomplish learning goals. Online environments make it even more difficult to get assistance especially more recently because of COVID-19. Given the multilingual context of SuaCode students—learners across 42 African countries...

Recognizing the emotions of the elderly is important as it could give an insight into their mental health. Emotion recognition systems that work well on the elderly could be used to assess their emotions in places such as nursing homes and could inform the development of various activities and interventions to improve their mental health. However,...

Extensive couples’ literature shows that how couples feel after a conflict is predicted by certain emotional aspects of that conver- sation. Understanding the emotions of couples leads to a better understanding of partners’ mental well-being and consequently their relationships. Hence, automatic emotion recognition among couples could potentially g...

Introductory hands-on courses such as our smartphone-based coding courses, SuaCode require a lot of support for students to accomplish learning goals. Online environments make it even more difficult to get assistance especially more recently because of COVID-19. Given the multilingual context of our students (learners across 38 African countries),...

The human voice communicates emotion through two different types of vocalisations: nonverbal vocalisations (brief non-linguistic sounds like laughs) and speech prosody (tone of voice). Research examining recognisability of emotions from the voice has mostly focused on either nonverbal vocalisations or speech prosody, and included few categories of...

Illness management among married adults is mainly shared with their spouses and it involves social support. Social support among couples has been shown to affect emotional well-being positively or negatively and result in healthier habits among diabetes patients. Hence, through automatic emotion recognition, we could have an assessment of the emoti...

Couples’ relationships affect partners’ mental and physical well-being. Automatic recognition of couples’ emotions will not only help to better understand the interplay of emotions, intimate relationships, and health and well-being, but also provide crucial clinical insights into protective and risk factors of relationships, and can ultimately guid...

Africa lags behind the rest of the world in terms of digital literacy skills with less than one percent of African children leaving school with basic coding skills. One cause of this gap is poor access to equipment such as computers for teaching and learning. Yet, there is a proliferation of smartphones in Africa. Seeking to leverage this opportuni...

Married adults share illness management with spouses and it involves social support and common dyadic coping (CDC). Social support and CDC have an impact on health behavior and well-being or emotions in couples' dyadic management of diabetes in daily life. Hence, understanding dyadic interactions in-situ in chronic disease management could inform b...

Background: Type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a common chronic disease. To manage blood glucose levels, patients need to follow medical recommendations for healthy eating, physical activity, and medication adherence in their everyday life. Illness management is mainly shared with partners and involves social support and common dyadic coping (CDC)...

Smartwatches provide a unique opportunity to collect more speech data because they are always with the user and also have a more exposed microphone compared to smartphones. Speech data could be used to infer various indicators of mental well being such as emotions, stress and social activity. Hence, real-time voice activity detection (VAD) on smart...

Background: Obesity in older adults is a significant public health concern. Weight-loss interventions are known to improve physical function but risk the development of sarcopenia. Mobile health devices have the potential to augment existing interventions and, if designed accordingly, could improve one's physical activity and strength in routine p...

Married adults share illness management with spouses and it involves social support and common dyadic coping (CDC). Social support and CDC have an impact on health behavior and well-being or emotions in couples dyadic management of diabetes in daily life. Hence, understanding dyadic interactions in-situ in chronic disease management could inform be...

Wrist-worn devices hold great potential as a platform for mobile health (mHealth) applications because they comprise a familiar, convenient form factor and can embed sensors in proximity to the human body. Despite this potential, however, they are severely limited in battery life, storage, bandwidth, computing power, and screen size. In this paper,...

BACKGROUND Type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a common chronic disease. To manage blood glucose levels, patients need to follow medical recommendations for healthy eating, physical activity, and medication adherence in their everyday life. Illness management is mainly shared with partners and involves social support and common dyadic coping (CDC)....

Diabetes mellitus Type II (T2DM) is a common chronic disease of the endocrine system in which the pancreas no longer produces enough insulin to metabolize blood glucose or the body becomes less sensitive to insulin. To manage blood glucose levels and to reduce the risk of diabetes-related complications (e.g., cardiovascular diseases, vision loss, a...

Mobile health (mHealth) interventions hold the promise of augmenting existing health promotion interventions. Older adults present unique challenges in advancing new models of health promotion using technology including sensory limitations and less experience with mHealth, underscoring the need for specialized usability testing. We use an open-sour...

Sarcopenia is defined as an age-related loss of muscle mass and strength which impairs physical function leading to disability and frailty. Resistance exercises are effective treatments for sarcopenia and are critical in mitigating weight-loss induced sarcopenia in older adults attempting to lose weight. Yet, adherence to home-based regimens, which...

The ability to monitor a person's level of daily activity can inform self-management of physical activity and assist in augmenting behavioral interventions. For older adults, the importance of regular physical activity is critical to reduce the risk of long-term disability. In this work, we present GeriActive, an application on the Amulet wrist-wor...

Technological innovation has the potential to speed up development. However, in most African countries the education system is largely theoretical in nature with inadequate attention to STEM education. In effect, students leave school lacking critical skills which are necessary in today's global economy. We developed and implemented a project-base...

Physical activity helps reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and obesity. The ability to monitor a person's daily activity level can inform self-management of physical activity and related interventions. For older adults with obesity, the importance of regular, physical activity is critical to reduce the risk of long-term disabil...