CV

Lecturer and Coordinator/Researcher Scientist

University of Pretoria, Pretoria. South African

Conduct research at the intersection of AI, with a focus on NLP, computer vision, and cybersecurity, and have 6+ years of experience providing technical leadership in machine learning and data infrastructure. I have a proven track record of managing million-dollar AI research initiatives and leading or collaborating with teams of researchers to develop innovative ML systems for NLP challenges.

• Led curriculum design, supervised research projects, and served as Big Data degree coordinator.
• Published multiple papers in top-tier NLP conferences and journals.
• Developed multiple funding proposals for research projects.

Best Student Paper Award

International Conference of Information Security and Internet Engineering (IAENG 2013)

The paper titled: Investigating Topic Models for Mobile Short Messaging Service Communication Filtering.

Mafoko: Structuring and Building Open Multilingual Terminologies for South African NLP

Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL), Co-located with DHASA2025

The study introduces Mafoko, a RAG-based framework that consolidates South Africa’s fragmented terminology into open datasets, improving translation accuracy and advancing equitable multilingual NLP technologies that better showcase the country’s linguistic diversity.

Cross-lingual embedding methods and applications: A systematic review for low-resourced scenarios

Natural Language Processing Journal

This study presents a systematic review of cross-lingual transfer learning (CLTL) techniques, focusing on their foundations, applications, evaluation methods, language coverage, and recent advances, and highlighting future research directions for low-resource NLP.