Growing up, Joseph Delali Etse M’28 always had a passion for telling stories. While in high school, he wrote poems and short stories. Soon, he began exploring other ways to bring those stories to wider audiences through videos and 3D animations, which he taught himself. Experiments with game development sparked his interest in programing. Years later, this interest led him to pursue an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
In his third year, he co-founded Votex 365 Ltd., an e-voting and e-ticketing company, with two colleagues. This was a response to complaints about unreliable e-voting and a lack of transparency in existing platforms on campus. Today, Votex 365 Ltd. has grown from a campus project into a registered company, with Etse serving as Chief Technology Officer.
Building Votex 365 to address voter concerns did not stop Etse from developing other solutions. A few months ago, after struggling to find a particular piece of information among the many files he had stored on a popular note-taking platform, he began thinking about a solution. That thinking led him to build Orb, an open-source platform designed to connect information across a collection of documents. It also allows users to ask questions about the content they have stored.
“Building Orb has been a very good way to learn about artificial intelligence (AI),” he shared. “I’ve been able to explore running AI models locally, which could allow sensitive information to be processed without always sending it to an external service.”
Hoping to deepen his understanding of artificial intelligence and how intelligent systems can be developed and evaluated, Etse has enrolled at Ashesi for the Master’s in Intelligent Computing Systems program. Eager to explore AI further, he looks forward to the challenges of graduate study.
He sees Orb, currently in its testing phase, as part of that challenge. He hopes to gather more feedback and insights to refine the platform as he uses it in his studies. He also anticipates input from other community members, whom he plans to onboard as testers and feedback contributors.
