2025 was a year of outstanding individual and collective recognition for MCAAI members at regional and international AI events. We are proud to celebrate the following achievements.
Cynthia Jayne Amol
- Alele-Williams Masters Award — awarded at Deep Learning Indaba 2025, Rwanda
- Google Data Science Africa Fellowship
- Caribou Recognition Award
Ezekiel Maina
- Google PhD Fellowship
- Best Poster Award — East Africa School for Young ML Researchers, University of Nairobi
Nelson Odhiambo Onyango
- Best Poster Award at Deep Learning Indaba 2025 — for his poster on a novel hate speech dataset comprising 19,369 tweets curated from Politikweli, Hate_Speech_Kenya, and AfriSenti. The dataset was cleaned, de-duplicated, language-labelled, and annotated across hate, offensive, and neutral classes, with further categorisation into eight target groups. The work demonstrated strong performance on code-switched and low-resource language data.
John William Muga
- Networking Prize — Deep Learning Indaba 2025
These achievements reflect the dedication, intellectual rigour, and collaborative spirit that define the MCAAI community. We congratulate every awardee and look forward to building on this momentum in 2026.
MC
MCAAI Communications
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