People

Abiodun, Modupe. CSIR, WITS

I am a data scientist (based in CSIR) and PhD associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, with a proven track record in applying cutting-edge technologies to solve data-driven problems including extracting information from heterogeneous data to aid decision-making; collecting and analysing user-contributed text (UGT) from social media sites in real-time to help analyse stylometric feature in tracing the true identity of anonymous document; and most recently, identifying misinformation in web content. With many years experience of applying machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to solve real-world problems both in industry and academia, I am always looking for ways to apply and extend my expertise by exploring new areas.

What excites me about NLP?

Based on the use of a language, the goal is to create an NLU method that addresses the ambiguity, vagueness and mimics the way humans natural understand languages.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Computational sociolinguistics, or how our social identity affects the way we use language in computational contexts.
  • Named Entity Recognition (NER), and relations (facts) extraction
  • Neural machine translation for low-resource languages
  • Stylometric Analysis

Connect:

Abeeb Afolabi. Ladoke Akintola University of Technology(LAUTECH)

Am an undergraduate student of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso, Nigeria, am a member of Lautech Data Science Community(LDC) also a member of Data Science Association. I am a student researcher, my researches are based to AI, ML, and Data Science. I holds Global Certificates in AI, ML and Data Analysis. Have worked on projects on Data Mining, Data Prediction, Data Analysis and Visualization.

What excites me about NLP?

NLP excites me because it aim in bridging the gaps of communication barrier among we Africans and the entire world at large, and also helps human natural language understanding with the help of NLP.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Speech to Speech and Text to Speech
  • Data Mining
  • Innovative Data Gathering

Connect:

Ari Anastassiou. University of Edinburgh

Recent MSc in AI grad, looking for opportunities in the space of NLP to help people.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Neural Machine Translation
  • Natural Language Understanding + Generation
  • Dialogue Modelling

Connect:

Ari Ramkilowan. Praekelt.com

Ari Ramkilowan holds an MSc in Physics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has over 7 years experience in the research and development space. In 2017 he joined Feersum Engine, a startup incubated at Praekelt.com as a Data Scientist where he is currently researching NLP tools and techniques to help bring conversational agent platforms to the emerging markets in Africa

What excites me about NLP?

The acceleration of progress in this field in the last 18 months

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • NLP for under resourced languages
  • Transfer Learning
  • Data Augmentation for NLP
  • Conversational AI

Connect:

Avashlin Moodley: CSIR, UP

I am based at the CSIR as a senior research and development technologist currently focusing on Human Language Technologies and Augmented Reality. A large part of my work over the last few years has been in Natural Language Processing for Text-To-Speech. I am one of the developers of the Qfrency Text-To-Speech and Rhonda Speech-To-Speech products offered by the CSIR for South African languages. My recent interests lie in using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for Text Mining and Social Media Analysis. My current research is a text mining study that focuses on knowledge discovery from news articles and tweets about the South African national election.

What excites me about NLP?

NLP excites me because it provides the tools to bridge communication barriers, create more natural human computer interfaces and conduct knowledge discovery from large text corpora.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Speech
  • Language Identification
  • Social Media Mining
  • Topic Modelling

Connect:

Bernardt Duvenhage: Feersum Engine, Praekelt Consulting

I am a computer scientist based in Pretoria. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pretoria, South Africa in 2015 and I'm also a Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer. In 2017 I joined Praekelt Consulting’s Feersum Engine team as the lead developer of their language and vision cloud services. Before Praekelt I was a principal researcher and a research group leader of image processing at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. My research interests include natural language understanding, computer vision and field robotics.

What excites me about NLP?

The possibility of building a real life J.A.R.V.I.S.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Conversational AI.

Connect:


Dawit (David) Uta: Wolaita Sodo University

I am technology enthusiast, Lecturer, and researcher. I hold M.Tech(CSE) from Symbiosis International University, India in 2018. Currently working senior Lecturer and researcher in Computer science department, Wolaita Sodo University, Ethiopia.

What excites me about NLP?

The possibility of building a real life J.A.R.V.I.S.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Named Entity Recognition (NER)
  • Part-of-Speech Tagging
  • Text Classification and Categorization
  • Semantic Parsing and Question Answering
  • Language Generation and Multi-document Summarization
  • Machine Translation.

Connect:

Girma Neshir Alemneh: Addis Ababa University

PhD Candidate in IR Track.

What excites me about NLP?

NLP, IR, Sentiment Analysis, Brain Computer Interface

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Sentiment Analysis
  • deep learning
  • text analytics

Connect:

  • Skype Name: live:girma1978

Jade Abbott: Retro Rabbit

I am a machine learning/NLP engineer at Retro Rabbit by day, and a machine learning & NLP researcher by night! My day to day work is focused around training and productionizing NLP models for startups - specifically in the field of semantic relatedness and chat mining. My evenings are filled with working on machine translation of African languages. I am passionate about empowering Africa to participate in the global conversation, and empowering the world by having Africa's participation. I would like to change the way the world percieves Africa

What excites me about NLP?

Using NLP as a tool to improve our methods of digital communication and connect us better

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Machine Translation for African Languages
  • Multi-lingual NLP models
  • Deploying NLP models into production
  • Model interpretability
  • Emotion, chat and argument mining

Connect:

Joseph Sefara: CSIR

My research interest includes, among others, speech processing and recognition, natural language processing, natural language understanding, data mining, machine learning, e-learning, data analytics, programming languages, speaker and emotions recognition, language identification, and artificial intelligence. I develop mobile applications, architectures, websites, and do cloud analytics. My recent projects can be found on Github. I am the author of textaugment Python library available on PyPi.

What excites me about NLP?

Ability to use Machine Learning to develop cool NLP applications.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Text analysis
  • Language identification
  • Code-switched and code-mixed Speech processing and recognition
  • Machine translation

Connect:

Linda Khumalo: University of the Witwatersrand, Deloitte S.A.

I am a Data Science Consultant and a Master's student in Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing.

What excites me about NLP?

My favourite thing about NLP is that language is the primary form of human communication. As long as humans live, we will communicate; hence, there will always be room for meaningful and interesting research in this space.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Word embeddings
  • Text Representation
  • Recurrent Neural Networks
  • Text Mining
  • Named Entity Recognition
  • Topic Modelling.

Connect:


Londiwe Cele: Raphta

I am a Machine Learning Junior engineer at Raphta(startup). New to AI space and Data science enthusiastic, currently enrolled in Udacity Data science Nanodegree. I like wine and hiking

What excites me about NLP?

Facts that NLP includes a wide set of syntax, semantics, discourse, and speech tasks.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Speech Recognition
  • Machine Translation

Connect:

Mathibele Nchabeleng: University of the Witwatersrand

I am a PhD student at Wits University. Previously worked on insights extraction from South African tweets.

What excites me about NLP?

Developing tools for Bantu languages. e

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Topic Modelling
  • Language identification and classification
  • Machine translation

Connect:

  • Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/mathibele-nchabeleng-47a43952


Naomi Molefe: Women in Big Data South Africa

Naomi has a background in Social Sciences, majoring in Psychology. She holds a Master of Science in Strategic Management and Planning from the triple accredited UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, in Dublin Ireland. She has extensive experience in Executive Talent acquisition and management, having worked across sectors in Mining, Telecommunications, Financial Services and Media Entertainment. Naomi serves as the Chair for the South African chapter of Women in Big Data. A global affiliate that spans across multiple countries and is a community of 5000+ women.

What excites me about NLP?

Our ability to model human behaviour based on cultural aspects like language, communication and demographics influenced by sociology and psychology. The link between computational psychology, language processing and social media behaviour is an interesting meeting point.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Text Classification and Categorization
  • Language Generation and Multi-document Summarization
  • Machine Translation
  • Speech Recognition
  • Character Recognition

Connect:

  • Twitter: @_naomiza
  • Linkedin: /naomimolefe


Rahim Shamsy: FutureSight

I graduated in 2018 from Western University, where I did a double degree in Civil Engineering and Business (Ivey Business School). My background in data science is in time series modelling and 'full stack data science'. During my undergrad, I did research in using time series modelling to forecast smart buildings' energy consumption. More recently, while I was working on my startup in the education space (where my interest in NLP sprouted from), I did contract work in data engineering, where I got to work on the end-to-end process of preparing data and creating data pipelines accessible via web applications. I now work at a venture studio in Toronto as a research analyst. I grew up in Tanzania and I hope to get involved in impactful NLP projects through this.

What excites me about NLP?

The ability to democratize services globally for the last mile, and the potential applications for this in education.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Dialogue systems
  • Question-answering

Connect:

Salomon KABONGO: African Institute for Mathematical Science

Born In Congo DRC, I'm a researcher with main interest in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. I am currently busy working on launching a start-up in Kinshasa.

What excites me about NLP?

What excites me mostly about NLP is the fast that it tries to fix one of humanity biggest problem, languages.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Machine Translation
  • Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Speech
  • Social Media Mining

Connect:

Temitope Kekere: Omdena

I am part of the Data Science for Social Impact research team at the University of Pretoria, where I'm looking at approaches to natural language processing. At Benson Idahosa University, I designed and constructed hearing aid for the hearing impaired. At Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, I analysed NSL-KDD dataset for intrusion, providing features to look out for during SQL injection attacks or network intrusion. Currently, using AI to reduce sexual crime at Omdena.

What excites me about NLP?

That someday there will be no difference between a robot speaking and a human Screen reader support enabled.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Natural Language Processing/ Understanding
  • Machine Translation
  • Deep Learning
  • Artificial / Augmented Intelligence
  • Text Mining
  • Interpretable Machine Learning

Connect:

  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/topeflakes


Tshepo Moagi: Ashanti AI, Anglo American

I am a Data Scientist at Ashanti AI (DS StartUp) and a Data Scientist Consultant at Anglo American. Previously worked in the mining industry now an NLP enthusiast, particularly for the African Context. I like Batman, pizza and coffee.

What excites me about NLP?

The fact that we as African Data Scientists have a great opportunity to drive the African narrative in the NLP space, only we can build tools that actually useful and representative of us diverse languages.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Language Identification and Classification.

Connect:

  • Twitter: @TshepoMoagi09


Vukosi Marivate: University of Pretoria, DLIndaba, CSIR

I am based at the University of Pretoria as the ABSA Chair of Data Science. I work on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of my work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (due to the abundance of text data and need to extract insights). I am an organiser of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. I am passionate about developing young talent, supervising MSc and PhD students and mentoring budding Data Scientists.

What excites me about NLP?

One of the ways we can better understand human behaviour is using the symbols we communicate with. As such, I look at NLP as a way to better understand people.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Social Media Mining and Web Mining
  • Data Augmentation for Low Resource Languages
  • Conversational Systems
  • Innovative Data Gathering

Connect:

Yonas Gido: Adama Science and Technology University

Msc candidate.

What excites me about NLP?

Ability to generate languages.

NLP Areas I am interested in:

  • Sentiment analysis
  • Speech recognition

Connect: