Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is passionate about African language technology, and has over a decade experience of work in teaching, lexicography, translation, and documentation. He was, between 2015 and 2019, a linguist at Google, working on localized speech technology solutions for Nigerian languages. His work has been presented at ICLR, Interspeech, and West African Language Congress conferences. He has also co-edited a book on African linguistics, and continues to collaborate with other researchers on open source solutions for African language speech technologies. He can be found at www.kolatubosun.com.
2021 Language Technical Advisory Panel
We establish an independent Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) for each Request for Proposals (RFP). TAP members bring strong technical and domain knowledge, and are responsible for identifying data gaps, refining RFPs, and reviewing and selecting proposals for funding. They also outline insights from the funding process and make recommendations for future funding considerations.
EM Lewis-Jong
Mozilla Foundation
About EM Lewis-Jong
Clara Rivera
About Clara Rivera
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Yorùbá Names Project
About Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Christian Resch
Deutsche Gesellschaft für International Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
About Christian Resch
Christian Resch works for the programme “FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All” at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für International Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). He leads FAIR Forward’s activities on access to data and technology and supports the country teams in Uganda, Ghana and Kenya. Before joining GIZ, he was at the European Central Bank and the statistics department of the Deutsche Bundesbank where he worked on natural language processing and the analysis of large-scale financial datasets.
Michael Melese
Addis Ababa University
About Michael Melese
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Makerere University
About Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Dr. Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Makerere University and the head of the Makerere Artificial Intelligence and Data Science research Lab. Joyce holds a PhD in Computer Science from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. Currently, Joyce leads a team of researchers that carry out research in the application of machine learning techniques in solving problems in the areas of agriculture, health and transport in the developing world. A large part of her work in the past year has been on natural language processing, building data resources for under resourced Uganda languages and computer vision for disease diagnosis. Her research interests are in the areas of machine learning, process mining and software engineering.
Ignatius Ezeani
Lancaster University, UK
About Ignatius Ezeani
Dr. Ignatius Ezeani is a Senior Teaching/Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK . He has a BSc (1st) in Computer Science, an MSc in Advanced Software Engineering, and a PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP). His research interests spans distributional semantics, machine learning, data science, deep neural models and general AI with focus on natural language processing for low-resource languages.
He interested in the application of NLP techniques in building resources for low-resource languages including, but not limited to, African languages. His current research work focuses on the efficient adaption of existing natural language processing tools and techniques to dealing with the challenges of integrating majority of the low-resource languages in a globalized world for task-oriented systems. Dr. Ignatius Ezeani has contributed in building tools that support languages like Igbo and Welsh and is currently working on other low-resource languages. He is also a visiting Senior Lecturer at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.