I’m a 21 year old AI research engineer from Kampala, Uganda.

I'm a software engineering student at Makerere University w/4.8 cgpa.

I’m also a member of technical staff at Crane AI Labs where we work closely in collaboration with the likes of the World Bank, Google, Nvidia, Cohere Labs and more.

I spent my early years building websites but later transitioned into AI research & engineering with a focus on agents, evals, multimodal AI and low resource and edge inference.

Technical contributions

• Co-led the first African Cultural context benchmark (UCCB) for LLMs at Crane AI Labs. UCCB later became the first African benchmark to be vetted and merged by the UK gov’t into its prestigious global AI safety framework, Inspect Evals.

• Built the data pipelines used to train Ganda-Gemma and Swahili-Gemma, the first open source on-device LLMs for Luganda and Swahili generation in collaboration with engineers at Google DeepMind and Cohere Labs.

  These models outperformed many proprietary closed source models like GPT-5 mini (benchmarks) at only 1B params and run entirely offline. Swahili-Gemma was also featured by Google DeepMind as a case study, the first of its kind from Africa.

• Co-authored a white paper on building sovereign AI models for my home country, Uganda as an initiative from the office of the president under AI Studio Uganda.

• Developed speech models for low resource language (Luganda) TTS at Crane AI Labs.

• Supported the formation of the Open Voice initiative, an open research project aiming to scale up audio data for low resource languages for ASR/TTS models. In partnership with engineers from Cohere Labs, Nvidia, DeepMind and more.

• Built TAI, a production e-commerce AI agent for a local startup Tubayo. Cutting down booking times across their travel products by 40% by helping users find what they need faster. TAI development started late 2023, before AI agents were cool.

• Built realtime customer support voice AI agents for a UK based startup, Tek Juice with sub-200ms latency and production reliability. Costing a fraction of the cost of popular alternatives like OpenAI realtime API.

I have also consulted with startups like Rentify on integrating AI across their stack to solve real problems beyond the hype.

If you’re a recruiter or would like to work with me consider downloading my complete CV here.

Ethos and how I work

I believe in working on complex problems with true intrinsic motivation. Not for money or recognition (which are still welcome lol) but for the love of the craft and the experience of solving hard problems.

As a Christian, I also believe work should be done with the highest level of honesty and integrity. I attribute my professional success to my faith and the amazing people I have had the privilege of working with.

When I'm not coding I'm cooking, watching my favorite anime (Demon Slayer Kimetsu no Yaiba) or reading about some obscure technology.