Otuu Obinna Ogbonnia, a native of Ehugbo, Afikpo LGA in Ebonyi State, has won the prestigious Best Tech Research Award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in collaboration with the Prime Minister of Japan.
Obinna is an innovator whose technologies are currently in use in the UK. He serves as the Chairman of the Igbo Community in Swansea, Wales, and is also a lecturer at Swansea University, UK.
The ACM award is a worldwide event. This year, it was hosted in Japan and sponsored by the Japanese government. In his own words, “For the Last two years, it has been in Melbourne, Australia. I competed but was selected for the Doctoral consortium only. So it has been getting better and better.”
A few months ago, the UK government honored him for developing C2C (Car-to-Car) technology, which enables vehicles to communicate with one another during emergencies.
On the 26th of May, the Ambassador of Nigeria to Japan ( Charge D’Affaires) hosted him at a banquet to celebrate his achievement as the first African to win the Best ACM Paper Award, triumphing over 5,020 contestants.
Previously, Otuu was named the Best NITDA Scholar, outperforming 513 contestants across Nigeria during the tenure of former Governor Dave Umahi.
The award came with a cash prize, which enabled him to pursue further studies in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence in the UK. Now, he has made history by becoming the first African to attain this international
recognition.
