October 29, 2025
12:00 pm
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1:30 pm
Enarson Classroom Building Rm 100
Africa @ Noon for October!
CAS has scheduled an Africa at Noon lecture for next week Wednesday, October 29 from 12:00pm-1:30pm. The location is Enarson Classroom Building room 100A. Abraham Toluwase Owodunni will speak about the application of AI to African languages.
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Going Beyond Text with AI for African Languages
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made great progress in understanding and generating written language, but in Africa, communication is much richer than text. From the rhythm of our speech to the meanings carried in our names, images, and sounds, much of African expression lives beyond the written word. This lecture explores how AI can move beyond text to truly reflect the realities of African life by learning from our voices, our accents, our stories, and our visual world. It highlights efforts to build technologies that can understand Africa's rich cultural identity. By looking at the next generation of language and multimodal technologies, this talk invites us to imagine an Africa-centered future for AI, one where technology not only speaks our languages, but also listens, sees, and understands in our own ways.
Abraham Toluwase Owodunni is a PhD student in Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University, where he is advised by Prof. Sachin Kumar. His research focuses on efficient multilingual representation learning and understanding how linguistic knowledge can transfer across models, especially in low-resource and African language settings. Formerly, he worked as a Lead Machine Learning Researcher at Intron, developing language and speech models tailored to African languages and accents, including work spanning the MENA region.
Lunch will be provided.