Ezekiel Maina

Ezekiel Maina leads the Computer Vision research faction at MCAAI and is the principal engineer behind the AI4KSL project — MCAAI's AI powered system for Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) glossing and avatar generation, developed in partnership with Data Science Africa (DSA).

Ezekiel designed and built the foundational model architecture that enables real-time translation of spoken English into KSL avatar animations. The system is built on a training dataset of over 20,000 annotated sign language videos, making it one of the most comprehensively resourced KSL computational systems in existence. His architecture combines pose estimation, transformer based sequence modelling, and avatar rendering pipelines to produce naturalistic signing animations that accurately capture the spatial grammar of KSL.

Prior to AI4KSL, Ezekiel contributed to the early data collection phase of the African Next Voices initiative, developing the web based voice recording platform used to gather speech data from community contributors across Western Kenya. This tool has since been used to collect thousands of hours of audio across multiple language communities.

Ezekiel's work on AI4KSL directly addresses the digital exclusion experienced by deaf and hard of hearing communities in Kenya, providing a scalable, AI driven solution to the absence of sign language interpretation in digital educational and professional environments. He is committed to ensuring that persons with disabilities are not an afterthought in Africa's AI development trajectory, but active participants and beneficiaries from the outset.