Abraham Owodunni

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, where I am privileged to be advised by Prof. Sachin Kumar. Previously, I was a researcher at Intron, where I worked on building language and speech models for African languages and accents (including MENA).
My research is focused on efficient multilingual representation learning and understanding how knowledge in language models can be transferred across different models.
Beyond research, I am passionate about mentoring aspiring AI researchers, and building open science ML communities. You’ll find me actively involved with Masakhane, ML Collective, Cohere Labs, and other collaborative initiatives. I firmly believe in democratizing access to knowledge, fostering collaborative ecosystems, and championing the ethos of shared discovery.
When I’m not doing research, I enjoy playing pool, lawn tennis, and table tennis (still working on improving my skills!), reading books, and listening to podcasts.
Podcast recommendation:
news
Jul 30, 2025 | Our papers AfriMed-QA got the Best Social Impact Award at ACL 2025! |
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Jul 17, 2025 | Checkout our new preprint: FLEXITOKENS: Flexible Tokenization for Evolving Language Models! We will be presenting at the ICML 2025 tokenization workshop. |
May 19, 2025 | Our papers The NaijaVoices Dataset: Cultivating Large-Scale, High-Quality, Culturally-Rich Speech Data for African Languages got accetped to Interspeech 2025! |
May 15, 2025 | Our papers AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset got accetped to ACL Main 2025! Joint work by partners from Google, PATH, Intron and Sinsoke. |
Sep 2, 2024 | I served as the Publication chair for the MRL 2024 Workshop at EMNLP. Checkout our proceedings. |
latest posts
selected publications
- Bloom Library: Multimodal Datasets in 300+ Languages for a Variety of Downstream TasksIn Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Dec 2022
- ICLR: AfricaNLPKoya: A Recommender System for Large Language Model SelectionIn 4th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing, Dec 2023