Dr. Idris Abdulmumin

My name is Idris Abdulmumin, a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Data Science for Social Impact Research Group at the University of Pretoria, under the supervision of Professor Vukosi Marivate. I am also a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. I obtained my PhD in August 2023 under the supervision of Professor Bashir Shehu Galadanci at Bayero University Kano, Nigeria. My doctoral research focused on enhancing machine translation systems for low resource languages by harnessing the power of monolingual data.

During my doctoral and postdoctoral journey, I had the privilege of extensive collaboration with fellow researchers, expanding my horizons. My involvement in organizations like Masakhane, HausaNLP, and LITHME broadened my insights into the global NLP community, fueling innovation. I’ve led impactful projects, organized events, curated datasets, and spearheaded initiatives, all dedicated to advancing NLP for African languages. As a postdoctoral fellow, I’m excited to embark on a new challenge of creating resource-efficient language models, with a focus on African languages. I aim to contribute to inclusive NLP research by developing accessible models tailored to the African community.