Adaora
Mbanefo

My active research lives in NLP 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. I'm also curious about quant trading.

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

And accessibility is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means students in higher education without reliable access to a computer. It means networks that drop in and out. It means someone who is curious and motivated and ready to learn, but hits a wall because every tutorial, every model, every interface assumes a language they don't speak. These aren't edge cases. They're the everyday reality of millions of people the technology was supposedly built to help.

Generative AI is one of the most powerful resources of our time, and every person should have the ability to use it and understand it! So part of why I do this work is to help bridge that gap. Not by deciding from the outside what Africa needs, but by supporting the people already building, and by working on tools that meet people where they actually are.

One thread I'm especially interested in: most of the AI being deployed today is trained largely on Western data, which means it doesn't really understand African contexts — socioeconomic realities, living situations, food, family structures, the texture of daily life. I want to work on models that aren't just usable by Africans but actually understand them. An Africa-centred LLM is a project I'm planning to explore.

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.