Africa-Press – Eritrea. Born and raised in the United States, Mr. Ahlem Seghed Omer is an Eritrean-American scientist who is working on the study of soil remediation. He is currently on a visit to Eritrea and looking for ways he could cooperate in the agricultural sector in soil remediation which can greatly increase the quality, quantity and value of crops.
Would you introduce yourself?
I was born in Michigan, U.S.A., in December 1984. I am the second born of my family. Originally my parents are from Qarora and Tesseney, Eritrea. My dad and his family migrated to the United States during the Eritrean war for independence. On both sides of my parents I am from the Beja, Bedawyet ethnic group. My father’s name is Omer Said and my mother’s name is Rayda Abduselam.
When I was younger I didn’t have that much exposure to my culture, but as I got older, because you can’t build a house in air. Then after I began to understand what I am and who I am. I began to look at what made me who I am because our ancestors were on this land for thousands of years. Here, in Eritrea, is where all of their history and culture is recorded and stored.
What makes all the people in our country Eritrean is the unity and values that they have built over the course of time and the connection they have with their land. I have been to a lot of countries, and have seen racial or ethnic segregation. But here in Eritrea everybody is just Eritrean, and that’s the most beautiful thing that I love about my country. While visiting the home villages of my parents in Tesseney and Girmayka, and I had a chance to see the beautiful culture of my origin, the Bedawyet ethnic group, and I loved it.
You are now studying several things related to soil science. Tell us more about your educational background and profession?
There are a couple of ways of completing high school education: by just taking the aptitude test or by taking the entire course session. So I took the aptitude test and finished my credits of high school when I was fourteen. But I was too young to join the University because in United States the legal age to leave for a college is 16. It differs from state to state, but this is the most common law. So even if you have finished your high school education before you reach the legal age, you have to stay in school.
In the meantime, I started to take university courses on my own. Thereafter I moved to Henry Fourth University, which was just a college at that time. I took a lot of courses on the philosophy of mathematics. After that I finished my first undergraduate degree on philosophical mathematics. Then I worked in a cafe for a year and stopped. A year later I went to Michigan University and did my second degree on theoretical physics. Thereafter I decided to spend the three years with my family and to find about my relatives and learn about my identity.
Three years later, I went back to my studies, and I went through the doctoral truck on theoretical physics. My thesis deals with how the realm of the quantum physics world interacts with the material world. When I got done I was getting ready to publish a paper on it, but that was the time when my journey to be modeling myself after an Eritrean started. At that time I had to do the publication and discovery while I was at the university because that is the way they take the credit to grant you the Ph.D. So I stopped that and I started to work with a consulting company because in order for me to be able to continue I had to pay for my studies, and that was very expensive. From that time on I planned to have my independent lab study, and from that point I did lab experiments at the University of Michigan and Berkeley. I also did another one in the UK, at Oxford University. I got done with that, and I worked for a year and half as a mathematical theorist in finance.
While you are on a visit here, in Eritrea, you are giving a presentation on a project about soil science at the head office of the Ministry of Agriculture. Tell us more about your research and the presentation.
Basically, there was a discovery we made that has to do with the extracting of a compound mineral able to reinvigorate the microbial and mineral life of soil. Instead of fertilizing, you can actually create soil in its moles atmospheric state and fertilize the soil. We just named it remediation of the soil, and we tested it a lot to come to conclusion and utilize it in a way that was going to remediate the soil rather than to fertilize it. By using that you can improve the quality of the crop and increase the crop yield by 54%. We are to build a model of that here in Eritrea. And we’ve been working on this with the Hidri group, a group initiated by Sedon Tesfamaryam, aka Seti, sister of the renowned late Eritrean-American singer Sador Tesfamaryam, aka Sand man. This is something we have been working on for years.
Coming here and working with the Ministry of Agriculture is giving us the opportunity to expand the idea for the benefit of the country. When it comes to the global trade, we would like to be able to manufacture the product at large scale, and this would have great economic benefits. Now several countries in Africa are also asking me to do this for them, but our idea and plan is for our country to be able to manufacture the product at large scale and be the first beneficiary.
Tell us about the AI (artificial intelligence) software that you have developed.
We just developed the Seti AI software based on the mathematical form of the theory of closeness. One can use it to rapidly search everything at once, and get the most viable answer. And one can also learn traits to create avatar himself. You can get any information you need by asking typing texts. You can learn so many techniques, various languages, and as it is interactive, it can also serve as a personal lawyer. Most of the AI softwares right now are providing information for the searches in a linear path. But we have created Seti to be mathematically collaborative as far as knowledge is concerned in whatever repository that we put it in. So it’s already mathematically calculated to know everything about one subject. Anytime something new comes in to that repository it doesn’t have to learn; it will automatically grab it. With some of the great AI softwares that many people use now, the information is only viable up to a certain time and scope.
Final remarks
The main thing that we’re focusing on now is the agricultural sector of the soil remediation, and the results that we’ve got in our tests have given us very strong results, with great certainty that it can exist in the real world. Through that we will be able to cooperate in a compatible way with the MoA’s five-year plan for organic high-quality food. We believe that introducing soil remediation will greatly increase our country’s crop quality, value and quantity of all the crops.
Source: Eritrea Ministry Of Information
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