Allan Anzagira, Senior AI Research Associate, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Allan is a Senior AI Research Associate at J.P. Morgan AI Research where he is currently working on research in explainable AI. He was a member of the organizing committee for the AI in Africa ICAIF workshop 2022 and also played active roles in the AI in Africa ICAIF workshop 2021. Prior to joining JPMorgan, he obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University. Duringhis PhD programme, Allan had a summer internship working with IBM AI Research at the T.J Watson Research Centre. He also taught various undergraduate classes in Electrical Engineering.
Toyin Aguda, Senior AI Research Associate, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Toyin is a Senior AI Research Associate at J.P. Morgan AI Research with focus on using AI to benefit the finance industry and beyond through generative AI, prompt engineering on LLMs, synthetic data generation and other NLP-related projects. She led ICAIF’22 workshop and co-led ICAIF’21 workshop. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Toyin worked as a Data Scientist III with Caterpillar, a subject matter expert on the clients’ data platform for aftermarket solutions, and also with Nielsen TV Rating as a Data scientist. Toyin is an Executive MBA candidate at The University of Chicago Booth school of Business. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago and another in Applied Probability and Statistics from Northern Illinois University.
Saheed Obitayo, Senior AI Research Associate, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Saheed is a Senior AI Research Associate at J.P Morgan AI research. His research interests lie around statistical data analysis, modelling, and synthetic data generation. Prior to joining J.P Morgan, Saheed worked at Apple focusing on geospatial statistics & analysis and Maps data QA. Saheed holds a master’s degree in Geophysical Engineering & Applied Mathematics from Texas Tech University and a fellowship at Rice University with a concentration in Data Visualization & Analytics.
Babatunde Sawyerr, Senior Lecturer, University of Lagos
Babatunde is a certified AI and a senior lecturer at the University of Lagos. He is a fellow of the Nigerian computer society (FNCS), a member to several learned and professional organizations and a visiting scholar to over 5 universities around the world. His research/expertise focus induces the design and development of Nature-Inspired search and optimization algorithms for both continuous and combinatorial optimization problems, AI, Machine Learning, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He has authored, co-authored several AI related papers. To mention a few, he is a founding member and research lead for Machine Intelligence Research Group (MIRG) and the Department of Computer Science and Mathematical ANalysis and Optimization Research Group (MANORG) at the University of Lagos.
Charese Smiley, AI Research Lead, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Charese is an AI Research Lead at J.P. Morgan AI Research. Her research interests center around natural language processing and computational linguistics. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Charese worked on the Vision & Language Technology team at Capital One and at Thomson Reuters, with the Research & Development group. Charese holds two patents for her research and is a winner of Turing tests for creative arts, claiming 1st prize in Dartmouth’s 2017 PoetiX competition for machine-generated sonnet most indistinguishable from human poetry. She also won the 2018 LimeriX competition for machine-generated limericks. Charese has a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Indiana University.
Samuel Assefa, Head of AI, U.S. Bank
Samuel is Head of AI and Applied R&D Innovation at U.S. Bank leading Innovation on the use of AI to transform financial services. He was previously an executive director of AI Research at J.P. Morgan. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Samuel worked as a Vice President of AI/ML & Data Science at Barclays, a Research Fellow in population genomics/bioinformatics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and as a computational biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Samuel is an honorary professor of Artificial Intelligence at Jimma University and an associate staff member of CDT-Africa at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He has an MSc in Information Systems from De Montfort University and an M.Phil and PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Samuel Mensah, Senior AI Research Associate, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Samuel is currently a Senior Research Associate at JP Morgan AI Research, where he specializes on natural language processing and deep learning for finance. Prior to his role at JP Morgan, Samuel was a Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield and was affiliated with the Sheffield NLP group. Simultaneously, he was associated with the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing (BDBC) at Beihang University, where he completed his PhD in Computer Software and Theory in 2020. Samuel has also worked with various reputable deep tech firms, including Safe Sign Technologies, where he served as an NLP Consultant. Additionally, he has an academic background as a lecturer in Mathematics at Regent University College of Science and Technology in Ghana. Samuel's research spans a broad spectrum within NLP, including text learning, sentiment analysis, question answering, named entity recognition, entity linking, etc.
Kayode Olayele, PostDoctoral Fellow at Data Science for Social Impact Lab, University of Pretoria
Kayode Olaleye is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, affiliated with the Data Science for Social Impact Lab. His research explores approaches for processing and generating code-switched and code-mixed data in African languages. He obtained his PhD from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.