OOU Marks Double Honour at Deep Learning Indaba 2026
Olabisi Onabanjo University has recorded a notable achievement in African artificial intelligence research following the Deep Learning Indaba (DLI) 2026, held in Lagos from 2–7 August under the theme “Sovereign Intelligence: Africa’s Path in a Frontier AI World.” Dr. Sakinat Folorunso, Associate Professor of AI Systems in the Department of Computer Science, received the Umuntu Prize for her contribution to the African machine learning community, an honour presented collectively to the ten-member IndabaX Steering Committee on which she served. She is Lead Organiser of IndabaX Nigeria and was a member of the Local Organising Committee for DLI 2026, roles through which she has helped widen participation for Nigerian students, researchers and AI practitioners within the continental machine learning ecosystem. Her MSc advisee, Akinbobola Adegboyega, was separately awarded the Grace Alele-Williams Masters Award, which recognises outstanding master’s-level research in computational and statistical sciences at African universities; DLI reported more than fifty nominations across its 2026 awards, underscoring the weight of the recognition.
Adegboyega’s award-winning research addresses a persistent gap in African natural language processing: the limited representation of low-resource languages in the datasets and evaluation frameworks that underpin modern AI systems. His work introduced affective fidelity as an evaluation dimension for English–Yorùbá machine translation, examining whether AI systems preserve not merely linguistic meaning but also emotion, cultural nuance, tone and idiomatic expression. The project produced a culturally validated bilingual dataset of more than 200 annotated paragraph pairs, alongside a reproducible benchmarking framework applied to four major language models, and it identified six distinct failure modes associated with translating tonal, low-resource languages. The dataset has since been openly released to support further research in Yorùbá NLP, African-language AI and emotion-sensitive machine translation.
Central to this outcome was the contribution of Dr. Tosin Akerele of the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages, who undertook the linguistic validation and curation of the English–Yorùbá emotion dataset, bringing to bear specialist knowledge of Yorùbá language, cultural expression and idiomatic usage. Working alongside Dr. Folorunso, who provided the project’s core direction in artificial intelligence, machine learning and research methodology as academic advisor, the collaboration paired computational rigour with linguistically grounded dataset development, an interdisciplinary pairing that lies at the heart of the research’s relevance to African-language technologies.
The University extends its congratulations to Dr. Sakinat Folorunso, Dr. Tosin Akerele and Akinbobola Adegboyega. Their combined contributions, spanning AI systems research, linguistic expertise and postgraduate scholarship, have brought Olabisi Onabanjo University recognition on one of Africa’s foremost AI platforms, and stand as a marker of the University’s growing capacity to advance African linguistic and cultural knowledge within the frontier of AI research.
