Rita Orji grew up in a village in Enugu State, Nigeria, where the lights simply didn’t come on at night because there weren’t any. This is a fact about her that is often overlooked under her titles, such as Canada Research Chair, UN panel appointee, and NSERC fellowship winner. No running water, no electricity. She disassembled and reassembled radios and bicycles as a child to learn how they operated, which is either a charming origin story or, depending on your point of view, the most obvious thing a future engineer could have done.
She had never used a computer before while studying computer science at Nnamdi Azikiwe University. Closing that gap won’t be easy. Despite finishing first in her class, she went on to earn a PhD as a Vanier scholar at the University of Saskatchewan before completing postdoctoral studies at Yale, McGill, and Waterloo. The work she has done since coming to Dalhousie University is where things really get interesting, even though it reads like a neat success story.
Orji holds the Canada Research Chair in Persuasive Technology and oversees the Persuasive Computing Lab, which may seem abstract until you see what her team actually creates. With an app called TreeCare, a virtual tree grows or wilts based on how much you move your body. It’s a tiny, almost playful nudge that changes behavior more consistently than a harsh alert could. PROSIT, developed in collaboration with psychiatrist Sandra Meier, monitors people’s social interactions, calls, and messages to determine how isolated they were during COVID lockdowns. It then attempts to forecast mental health outcomes before they worsen.
Her unwavering belief that there is no one-size-fits-all solution is what sets her work apart from the wellness app market as a whole. She would contend that an app created in California is unlikely to have the same impact in Lagos or Accra. Therefore, her lab developed a private, game-based app that teaches teenagers about HIV and STIs in areas of Africa where discussing sex is still genuinely taboo. This content would never be taught in schools and would be delivered in a private setting. It’s a simple piece of software that accomplishes what a curriculum couldn’t.
It’s difficult to ignore how much of her research consistently focuses on groups that mainstream tech design ignores, such as women in areas with low educational attainment, marginalized communities, and groups that Silicon Valley researchers seldom consider until a market opportunity arises. Additionally, she has advocated for this through her nonprofit work back home, starting a program to keep girls in school in an area where, in her words, marriage was the only viable option.
She was one of just forty experts worldwide and one of two Canadians chosen from more than 2,600 applications when the UN appointed her to its new Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence in February. It’s a significant appointment, and it’s easy to interpret it as confirmation that creating technology with culture rather than convenience in mind was the right choice all along.
These organizations don’t always act quickly, so it’s still unclear if the panel will actually change how AI is governed globally. However, it feels, at the very least, like a helpful counterbalance to who typically gets to define how AI should behave to have someone in the room who developed her first understanding of machines from a radio without electricity to plug it into.
