2022-02-25

#AlumOfTheWeek – Mamadou Gueye, AIMS Rwanda.

Money transfer has become a critical part of our lives as humans. Expatriates are always looking for the best and safest method to send money back home for several reasons, including family upkeep, building, and school fees. While this is happening, some individuals also devise means to divert these funds into their private accounts, defrauding unlooking individuals and making money transfers a topic of concern.

WorldRemit, a leading cross-border digital payment, money transfer, and remittance platform, approached the Ishango team to help solidify their system. The task was to detect fraud that occurs within the transfer process. Primarily, the team uses data analysis and modelling approaches to understand better the relationship between senders and recipients of money on the platform to detect fraud and stop it from happening. The AIMS alumni Mamadou Gueye was tasked by Ishango to work on this project.

Mamadou is a Senegalese national who attended AIMS Rwanda for his African Masters of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) from 2019 to 2020 and specialized in Machine Learning. He has a Master in Big Data from Gaston Berger University, from 2016 to 2018. He attended Gaston Berger University between 2012 -2016 for a BSc. Degree in Computer Science.

He has appreciable knowledge in programming languages, including Python, C, C++, Java, HTML, CSS, Prolog, SQL, and PHP. As a Data Scientist, he leans towards Machine Learning with a keen interest in NLP, Computer vision, fraud detection, and data analysis.

He participated in the Challenge of the IT Company Gainde 2000, where he had to offer a solution for the fishing sector held in Senegal in March 2016, an application which allows the fish seller and customers to communicate efficiently – “My team designed one of the best apps, Baxema’app.” He interned at the Gaston Berger University in November 2017. His assignment was to implement a web application for searching and reserving available classrooms between any given hour x and y at Gaston Berger University. Mamadou worked at Total Senegal in May 2018 as an IT Intern. His assignment was to implement a mobile app and web application for monitoring service stations. He is the CEO and founder of the startup XamTIC Group in 2018 and the project manager of Jolof Sante. Jolof Sante is a health project designed to help his compatriots access pharmaceutical information on weekends and nights.   Jolof Sante also offers a drug delivery service for people with constraints. In October, Mamadou’s team won the first position among French-speaking countries in Africa of the Laureate of Programming Competition in West Africa: ICPC held online in Senegal. 

In August 2020, he joined Ecofin / Gaston Berger University as a Machine Learning Project Manager. He supported building a text-Classification model and an article recommendation system. He integrated both into the University platform. In September 2021, Mamadou joined the WorldRemit project under the AIMS-Ishango Data Science Fellowship Program.

AIMS continues to lead the transformation of Africa through scientific through innovative scientific training, technical advances, and breakthrough discoveries. This vision is achieved by enabling Africa’s brightest students to flourish as independent thinkers, problem solvers, and innovators capable of propelling Africa’s future scientific, educational, and economic self-sufficiency.