Nelson Odhiambo

Nelson Odhiambo is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Maseno University, where his doctoral research focuses on machine translation for low-resource African languages. At MCAAI he leads the Machine Translation team within the NLP research programme, directing the development of neural translation systems for Dholuo, Kikuyu, and related Nilotic and Bantu languages.

Nelson's translation research employs a range of architectures — from sequence to sequence models with attention mechanisms to modern multilingual transformer approaches such as mBART and NLLB — adapting them to the specific morphological and tonal characteristics of his target languages. His work on Dholuo English machine translation has produced the first publicly available neural translation system for the language pair, a milestone that opens up new possibilities for cross lingual information access for Dholuo speakers.

Nelson is also the pioneer of MCAAI's Hate Speech Sentiment Analysis project, a timely research initiative that applies NLP techniques to detect and classify harmful content in African language social media contexts. The project addresses a critical gap in content moderation infrastructure: mainstream AI content moderation systems are trained almost exclusively on high-resource languages and systematically fail to identify harmful content in Dholuo, Kikuyu, and other Kenyan languages. Nelson's work provides the first computational tools for addressing this gap at scale.

Through both his translation and hate speech research, Nelson exemplifies MCAAI's conviction that NLP technology must serve not only the scientific community but also the everyday safety and wellbeing of African language users online.