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.
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.
Michael Melese
Addis Ababa University
About Michael Melese
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Makerere University
About Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Josef van Genabith
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
About Josef van Genabith
Josef van Genabith is one of the Scientific Directors of DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, and a Professor at Saarland University, Germany. At DFKI he heads the Multilinguality and Language Technology (MLT) Lab, at the University he holds the Chair of Translation-oriented Language Technologies. His first degree is in Electronic Engineering and English, RWTH Aachen (Germany). He obtained a PhD at the University of Essex (U.K.) and worked as a researcher at the University of Stuttgart (Germany). From 1997-2014 he was in the School of Computing at Dublin City University (Ireland), where he was the Director of the National Center for Language Technology (NCLT) and founding Director of the CNGL (now ADAPT).
Surafel Melaku Lakew
Amazon AI
About Surafel Melaku Lakew
Surafel is an applied scientist at Amazon AI, where his research centers on finding new modeling mechanisms in the area of machine translation. He completed his Ph.D. at FBK-Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the University of Trento in 2020. His thesis — “multilingual neural machine translation for low-resource languages” focuses on ways to improve the performance of machine translation models for languages without large-scale training data.
Jason Baldridge
About Jason Baldridge
Jason is a research scientist at Google, where he works on natural language understanding. He was previously an Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His main research interests include applied natural language processing, semantics, and language grounding. Jason received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 2002, where his doctoral dissertation on Multimodal Combinatory Categorial Grammar was awarded the 2003 Beth Dissertation Prize from the European Association for Logic, Language and Information.
Jane Polak Scowcroft
Mozilla
About Jane Polak Scowcroft
Jane Polak Scowcroft is New Product Lead at Mozilla. Jane brings international experience in the intersection of deep research, breakthrough technology, policy and new products across all types of organizations – startups, governments and not-for-profits, and industry. With a computer engineering and psychology background, and over a decade of product experience, Jane brings a unique problem solving approach to the most challenging technical and social challenges.
Jane is passionate about leveraging technology to break through digital divides. And that’s exactly why she is devoting her career to building out tech in the open, starting with voice tech, and encouraging a more equitable and diverse approach to this domain.
Graham Neubig
Carnegie Mellon University
About Graham Neubig
Graham Neubig is an associate professor at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. His work focuses on natural language processing, specifically multi-lingual models that work in many different languages, and natural language interfaces that allow humans to communicate with computers in their own language. Much of this work relies on machine learning, and he is also active in developing methods and algorithms for machine learning over natural language data. He publishes regularly in the top venues in natural language processing, machine learning, and speech, and his work has won awards at EMNLP 2016, EACL 2017, and NAACL 2019.
Febe de Wet
Stellenbosch University
About Febe de Wet
Febe de Wet is a research associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa where she works in the Digital Signal Processing group affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Her research interests include statistical pattern recognition, speech resource development and automatic speech recognition. She is especially interested in developing language technology for South Africa’s indigenous languages and in educational applications of speech technology.
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.