CV
An abridged CV — use the button above to download it as a PDF. Full CV available on request.
General Information
| Full Name | Idris Abdulmumin, PhD |
| Focus | Natural Language Processing for African and low-resource languages |
| Based in | Pretoria, South Africa |
| Languages | Hausa (native), English, Nigerian Pidgin |
Education
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2023 PhD, Computer Science
Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria - Thesis: Domain-Aware Self-Learning and Synthetic Data Transfer for Efficient Back-Translation in Low Resource Neural Machine Translation.
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2017 MSc, IT Security
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK - Dissertation: Web Application Security Analysis.
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2013 BSc, Computer Science
Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria - Project: Plagiarism Checker, File Comparer and Project Library Software.
Experience
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2025, 2026 Visiting Professor
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), South Africa -
2026 Research Associate
Data Science for Social Impact, University of Pretoria, South Africa -
2023 - 2025 Postdoctoral Fellow
Data Science for Social Impact, University of Pretoria, South Africa -
2023 Lecturer I
Department of Computer Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria -
2020 - 2023 Lecturer II
Department of Computer Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria -
2017 - 2020 Assistant Lecturer
Department of Computer Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria
Teaching
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2025 Natural Language Processing and LLMs (MSc)
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, South Africa -
2025 COS760: Natural Language Processing (Honours)
University of Pretoria -
2023 - now Natural Language Processing
Arewa Data Science Academy -
2017 - 2023 OOP I & II, Advanced Databases, Software Engineering & SE Methodologies (MSc)
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria
Grants and Awards
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2025 - Principal Investigator — AfriGemma: Advancing African Language NLP for Research, Healthcare, and Societal Benefit
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2022 - Co-Investigator — AI for Education Innovation Research Network in Africa
- Co-Investigator — Google CSR Award
- Co-Investigator — Lacuna Fund 2021 Language Datasets Award
- Co-Investigator — Oracle OCI Award
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2021 - Co-Investigator — Lacuna Fund 2020 Language Datasets Award
Research Interests
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African & Low-Resource NLP
- Machine translation and data augmentation for low-resource languages
- Open datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation resources
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Language & Speech Technologies
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS)
- Sentiment, emotion, hate, and offensive language analysis
- Large language models for African languages
Community & Service
- Co-organiser of shared tasks across SemEval, WMT, IWSLT, and AfricaNLP.
- Active in Masakhane, HausaNLP, LITHME, and the Open Language Data Initiative (OLDI).