Rose Dieng

Rose Dieng was born in Senegal and showed such strong results in mathematics that she was accepted into France's competitive Grande Ecole system, becoming the first African woman to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, one of the most selective engineering schools in the world and one that had admitted almost no African students at all, let alone women, in the years before her.

She went on to earn a doctorate in computer science and joined INRIA, the French national research institute for computer science, where she built her career in knowledge engineering, the branch of artificial intelligence concerned with how expert knowledge can be captured, structured and shared between people and machines rather than locked inside a single specialist's head. She led a research team, Acacia, that worked on tools for organisations to build and reuse collective knowledge, publishing widely on cooperative and distributed systems for reasoning.

Beyond her own research, she was an active mentor to younger African scientists and pushed for stronger computer science education and research links between Africa and Europe, at a time when such collaboration was rare and unevenly funded. She died in 2008 in a car accident in Senegal while still an active researcher, and colleagues and former students have continued to cite her insistence that African universities needed their own research capacity, not just imported technology.