Biatus Maina

Biatus Maina is a Master's student at Maseno University and a Research Associate at MCAAI, contributing to the centre's machine learning engineering infrastructure. With a strong practical grounding in software engineering, model optimisation, and MLOps practices, Biatus serves as a key technical collaborator for teams across MCAAI's four research programmes.

His primary contribution is in translating research prototypes into robust, production ready systems. The gap between a research model and a deployable application is often large — involving performance optimisation, API development, data pipeline engineering, and integration testing — and Biatus plays a central role in bridging this gap across MCAAI's portfolio. He has contributed engineering support to the AI Farm Assistant, the DhoNam corpus processing pipeline, and the AI4KSL avatar backend system.

Biatus is also deeply involved in MCAAI's internal tooling development, building the data management systems, annotation interfaces, and model evaluation dashboards that enable the centre's researchers to work efficiently at scale. His contributions — while often invisible in published research outputs — are essential to MCAAI's ability to move rapidly from research idea to working prototype to deployable system.

He is supervised by Dr. Samwel Oonge and works in close collaboration with Starnley Odiwuor on the centre's MLOps and deployment infrastructure.