Kathleen Siminyu

Kathleen is a Natural Language Processing researcher at the DAIR Institute. She focuses her research on African languages as a form of activism and from a desire to see these languages better represented on digital platforms. Kathleen has been involved in various efforts to build language datasets. Her experiences in building open datasets has inspired a desire to explore data governance and licensing models that can ensure maximum benefit is returned to the communities of dataset builders and subjects. Kathleen also works with African AI communities to enable ecosystem capacity building and research relevant to Africa. She continues to organise with communities as part of the Deep Learning Indaba, where she is a trustee and the Masakhane Research Foundation, where she is a director.