Adaora
Mbanefo

My active research lives in NLP/NLU and computational linguistics. I work with deep learning architectures (LSTMs, transformer-based models like BERT) and eye-tracking data to examine how teens and adults process text, and whether computational models can predict their eye movements from visual and linguistic features. But my interests run wider than what I'm researching at any given moment.

I want to work in machine learning and AI engineering more broadly. Not just studying models but building them, shipping them, and figuring out why they break.

All of this connects to something bigger I think about a lot. The technical divide between the African continent and the rest of the world is widening fast, especially in AI and language technology. But it isn't about talent. Africa has brilliant people, researchers, and builders. Even the infrastructure is there, or catching up. What's missing is something deeper.

Most of the AI being deployed today is trained on Western data. It speaks Western languages, understands Western lives, reflects Western assumptions about how the world works. When an African student opens ChatGPT or pulls down a model from HuggingFace, the tool will serve them, technically. But it doesn't know them. It can't recognise the contexts they live in, the languages they speak with their families, the socioeconomic realities they're navigating, the way daily life actually looks.

As these systems become more embedded in education, work, healthcare, in the texture of what's possible to build, the question of who AI is for matters more and more. And right now, AI is largely not for Africa. It can be used by Africans. It doesn't represent or understand them.

That's the gap I want to help close. Not by deciding from the outside what Africa needs, but by working on tools and research that include African data, languages, and contexts from the ground up. Generative AI is one of the most powerful resources of our time, and every person should be able to use it and understand it!

Closer to home, I'm also looking at ways to improve life for people back home in South Africa through initiatives focused on the youth. More on that as those projects take shape; a few live on the projects page.