Workshop Agenda

Chinasa T. Okolo

Chinasa T. Okolo, Ph.D., is the Founder of Technecultura and a recent Computer Science Ph.D. graduate from Cornell University. Her research focuses on AI governance and safety for the Global Majority, datafication and algorithmic marginalization, and the geopolitical impacts of AI. Dr. Okolo has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential people in AI by TIME, honored in the inaugural Forbes 30 Under 30 AI list, and advises numerous multilateral institutions, national governments, corporations, and nonprofits. She is the inaugural Policy Lead for Black in AI and has previously worked as a World Bank Group Africa Fellow, a Policy Specialist at the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET), a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and in research-based roles at Apple and Microsoft. Her research has been widely covered by media outlets and published in top-tier venues in human-computer interaction and sociotechnical computing. 

Joy Olusanya

Joy Olusanya is a linguist and NLP research engineer. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Her work centres on advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low-resource languages, spanning both text-based and speech-based technologies. She serves as the Workshop Chair for the Centering Low-Resource Languages and Cultures in the Age of Large Language Models (CLRLC-LLMs) workshop at NeurIPS 2025. She is also the Founder and CEO of the Center for Low-Resource Languages and Cultures (CLRLC), a global ecosystem dedicated to democratising AI through ethical data curation, inclusive research, and community-driven innovation. 

Ayantola Alayande

Ayantola Alayande is a researcher at the Global Center on AI Governance, where his work focuses on state-led approaches to AI governance, responsible AI policy measurement, and international AI cooperation. His previous work in data consulting and market research straddled the private sector and civic tech in Africa and the UK. His PhD research, funded by the Clarendon-Trinity College fund at the University of Oxford, examines how South Africa and India navigate geopolitical tensions in their AI infrastructure supply chain. Ayantola is a 2026 Emerging Technologies Fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and an honorary lecturer at the University of Cape Town. 

Yanick Kemayou

Yanick Kemayou is co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of Kabakoo Academies, named one of the World Economic Forum's 16 "Schools of the Future." From Bamako and Lomé, Kabakoo's "Highdigenous" model pairs AI with West African endogenous knowledge. Its WhatsApp-based AI upskilling system serves youth across West Africa in French and Bamanankan. The system is trained partly on community-recorded speech data, with income effects tracked in a three-year randomized evaluation. Yanick grew up in Bafoussam, Cameroon, and worked as a street vendor in Yaoundé before earning a PhD in economics from Paderborn University, where he teaches on informally dominated economies. He previously held an associate professorship at the Sorbonne. 

Chris Emezue

Chris Emezue is a mathematician & computer scientist with a passion for languages and improving people's lives with technology. He has spent half a decade designing inclusive AI technologies that better serve the African population. His research areas cut across the intersection of natural language processing, causality, and reinforcement learning. Currently, he leads Lanfrica, where he is transforming fragmented African knowledge into open infrastructure that people and AI can build on.

Raesetje Sefala

Raesetje is an AI Researcher at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute and a PhD candidate in the school of Computer Science at McGill University. She is studying the properties of labeling errors in datasets used to train AI models and their impact on the models. One of her most significant contributions involves creating datasets and using AI techniques to study the effects of spatial apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa. Raesetje has collaborated with various stakeholders to build AI solutions for social good and to organize gatherings that promote responsible AI both internationally and across the African continent. She has also co-founded the African Computer Vision Summer School (ACVSS) and is also the recipient of the Mozilla 2024 Rise25 Award, which recognizes her efforts to leverage philanthropy, collective power, and open-source principles in order to ensure that the future of AI is responsible, trustworthy, inclusive, and centered around human dignity.

Kathleen Siminyu

Kathleen is a researcher at the DAIR Institute. Her focus is in Natural Language Processing, particularly building speech recognition technologies for African languages, notably Kiswahili. Kathleen works with African AI communities to enable ecosystem capacity building and relevant research. She continues to organise with communities as part of the Deep Learning Indaba, where she is a trustee and the Masakhane Research Foundation, where she is chair of the board of directors. Kathleen’s work has received recognition, including being listed as one of the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 for 2022 and the Mozilla RISE25 Honourees for 2024. 

Tadesse Destaw Belay 

Tadesse is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the Computing Research Center, National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), Mexico City, Mexico, and is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His research focuses on multilingual natural language processing (NLP), particularly cultural representation, low-resource languages, speech processing, and the safety of language models. He is passionate about building inclusive AI systems that empower people to communicate, access knowledge, and interact with technology in their native languages, regardless of the resources available for those languages.