Graduate Research Assistant
Vision & Language Lab, CMU Africa | 2025 -
Present
Researching Project WAKANDA AI and CASL-TransSLR, building speech translation and
sign language recognition systems for underserved African language communities.
- Developed a privacy-preserving pose-only transformer for Central African Sign
Language recognition, achieving 80.39% signer-independent accuracy.
- Building PyTorch data pipelines, distributed training workflows, and reproducible
experiments for low-resource Bantu speech translation.
Data Science Intern
Credable | Dubai, UAE / Remote
Built financial machine learning pipelines for income estimation and customer
segmentation from mobile-money transaction behavior.
- Engineered 77 behavioral features in PySpark and Databricks, reaching up to
0.967 R² for visible-income prediction and validating transaction-derived income
proxies for affordability decisions.
- Developed a cross-platform linkage pipeline for KashNow, Kwasa, and Airtel Money,
connecting 5.87M customers to transaction behavior through identity validation
and SHA-256 mobile matching.
- Built a KMeans behavioral segmentation model with a 0.552 silhouette score and
scored 7.35M+ customers into activity-based proxy tiers while supervised labels
were being resolved.
AI Researcher
ECHO | 2025 - Present
Developing low-resource speech systems for ECHO, a multilingual conversational AI
platform for African languages.
- Built a 51-hour Kinyarwanda speech corpus from 28,263 unique phrases using large
multimodal models to generate and curate synthetic training data at about
$1.23/hour.
- Fine-tuned and evaluated MMS and OuteTTS architectures for Kinyarwanda TTS,
achieving 19.2% WER with OuteTTS-1B on human-recorded speech.
- Researching model optimization for multilingual speech deployment on
resource-constrained devices, reducing latency and compute requirements while
preserving intelligibility.
Founder
YEN Pastries | 2019 - 2022
Founded and operated a pastry and catering venture, trained young women in practical
skills, and grew an online community of more than 1,100 followers.
