Perez Ogayo is a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University's Technologies Institute (LTI). Prior to her studies at Carnegie Mellon, she received her BSc in Computer Science from African Leadership University-Rwanda. Perez's research pursuits lie in the realm of multilingual and low natural language processing (NLP), where she focuses on machine translation, speech synthesis and recognition, and NLP for endangered languages. Additionally, she is interested in the efficient deployment of NLP models on smaller devices, as she recognizes the importance of accessibility and sustainability in the field. Alongside her studies at Carnegie Mellon, Perez currently serves as a researcher at Masakhane, where she works on the Luo, Swahili, and Suba languages.

Paul Azunre holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and has served as a principal investigator on several DARPA research programs. He founded Algorine Inc., a research lab dedicated to advancing AI/ML and identifying scenarios where they can have a significant social impact. Paul also co-founded Ghana NLP, an open-source initiative focused on using NLP and transfer learning with Ghanaian and other low-resource languages. He also serves as Director of Research at Dun & Bradstreet, a company helping businesses manage supply chain risk and other business analytics challenges. He is the author of the recently published book, "Transfer Learning for NLP" by Manning Publications.

Elizabeth Salesky is a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Philipp Koehn and Matt Post. Her research primarily focuses on language representations for machine translation and multilinguality, including how to create models that are more data-efficient and robust to variation across languages and data sources. 

Dr. Seid Muhie Yimam is currently a technical lead at HCDS and a research associate at Language Technology Group, under the supervision of Prof. Chris Biemann. At HCDS, he will mostly work on leading and consulting research on digital humanities that involve big data processing of textual content. He will continue teaching NLP and Data science courses in the house while supervising students on interdisciplinary AI and data science research topics. He is currently participating in the development of a research data and knowledge management project, an intersectional project with knowledge management, AI, and library science. The project is envisioned to ingest metadata from research reports and projects automatically from diverse sources to present the outcomes using appealing visualization components.

He has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at Language Technology Group, UHH, since January 2020. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Universität Hamburg, with a specialization in the integration of adaptive machine learning models into annotation tools and NLP applications. From January 2020-March 2022, he has been working on multiple research topics including social media NLP (hate speech detection, fake news identification, and sentiment analysis) and low-resource language NLP research, mostly for the Ethiopian language of Amharic that include named entity recognition, semantic models, hate speech detection, and sentiment analysis. He has been teaching NLP courses and supervising Master’s projects and thesis in the group.

Laurent Besacier is a principal scientist and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research team lead at Naver Labs Europe. Before that, he became a professor at the University Grenoble Alpes (UGA) in 2009 where he led the GETALP group (natural language and speech processing). Laurent is still affiliated with UGA. 

His main research expertise and interests lie in the field of natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, machine translation, under-resourced languages, machine-assisted language documentation and the evaluation of NLP systems.

Asmelash Teka Hadgu is the Co-founder and CTO of Lesan and a fellow at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). At Lesan, he has built state-of-the-art machine translation systems to and from Amharic, Tigrinya, and English. Prior to Lesan, Asmelash did his Ph.D. at the Leibniz University Hannover where his research focused on applied machine learning for applications in scholarly communication, crisis communication, and natural language processing in low resource settings. Currently, as part of the Lesan-DAIR partnership, he is working on language technologies for Ge’ez based languages such as Tigrinya and Amharic.

Audace Niyonkuru is  Chief executive officer of Digital Umuganda , an AI and Open data company focusing on democratising access to information in African languages by the creation of open & publicly available datasets to spur AI research and innovation on the continent .He is also a member of United Nations Internet governance forum multi stakeholder advisory group.