Experience
Work experience
2024-Present: Postdoctoral Researcher
- Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany
- Dialogue Systems and Machine Learning Group
- Lamarr Fellow Network Ramp Up Project
- Lecturing: Implementing Transformer Models Practical Series
- Supervision of Bachlor and Master students
2019-2024: Doctoral Candidate and Research Scientist
- Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany
- Doctoral Candidate in the Dialogue Systems and Machine Learning Group
- Lecturing: Implementing Transformer Models Practical Series
2018-2019: AI Consultant
- NGA Risksecure, Pretoria, South Africa
- Consultation on AI solutions
- Implementation of AI solutions
- Projects: Natural Language Processing for Risk Security, Image Classification for plant disease detection
2016-2018: Teaching assistant
- University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
- Tutorial and Practical Lectures
- Grading of Papers and Assignments
- Modules: Distribution Theory, Stochastic Processes, Actuarial Statistics
Projects
- Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Understanding: Designed a framework for estimating and then leveraging uncertainty in dialogue systems to improve user experience and robustness during interactive tasks.
- Dialogue System Evaluation via AWS Mechanical Turk: Designed and developed a custom evaluation interface enabling large-scale human-in-the-loop testing of dialogue agents in AWS.
- Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs: Designed and implemented a custom reinforcement learning framework to improve answer trustworthiness in LLMs.
- Generative AI Feedback Summarization Agent: Designed and implemented a web-based summarization tool that transcribes verbal feedback and generates topic-wise summaries across multiple subjects. Full stack engineered the application using FastAPI and JavaScript with PUG, integrated with OpenAI APIs.
- Entity Sentiment Prediction from Media Reports: Designed, trained, and deployed an AI model to predict entity-specific sentiment analysis from multilingual media sources, enabling real-time sentiment scores for clients in the banking industry.
Professional Activities
- Supervision of BSc and MSc students in the Dialogue Systems and Machine Learning group, 2023 - Present
- Member of the ConvLab 3 toolkit development team, 2020 - Present
- Organizer of the Dialogue Systems and Machine Learning Seminar Series, 2023 - Present
- Reviewer for ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, SIGDIAL, and others, 2020 - Present
- Lecturer and Designer of the Master’s Course “Implementing Transformer Models”, 2023-2024
- Co-organiser of the Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) 2022
- Supervisor of the Dialogue Reward Estimation Project within the Dialogue Systems and Machine Learning group, 2021-2023
- Lead of the PyDial Python conversion project, 2019
- Co-supervisior of BSc (Hons) Student at the University of the Pretoria, 2017
Service and leadership
- First Tech Challenge Robotics Coach at Woodhill College
- Camera Operator and TV Director at NG Church Moreleta Park
- Camera Operator, TV Director and TV Producer at Hillsong Church Düsseldorf