2019 | Professor Audrey Mbogho

Prof Audrey Mbogho is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Pwani University in Kilifi, Kenya, where she also serves as the Chair of Department for the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She lectures there in the BSc in Computer Science programme primarily, but is from time to time also called upon to service the MSc in Hospitality and Tourism Management and MSc in Bioinformatics programmes. Her main research interests are machine learning and its applications to challenges facing the developing world. In this vein, she is embarking on a project to look at how to boost the digital resources of her native language, Kidawida, for purposes of (1) preservation and (2) the development of human language technologies (HLT), such as speech recognition and speech synthesis, which depend on large data repositories that are currently not available for what are referred to as "under-resourced languages". Specifically, she intends to start work on a system that can facilitate crowdsourcing of textual and audio data for Kidawida. Through the The AfOx-TORCH Fellowship, Prof. Mbogho will spend six weeks at Oxford to discuss her project with experts in computational linguistics and to explore avenues of collaboration towards important interdisciplinary, cross-cultural HLT work.

Prof Mbogho will be an AfOx-TORCH Visiting Fellow during Summer 2019. Her academic hosts are Prof Mary Dalrymple and Prof John Coleman from the Department of Linguistics. During her stay in Oxford, Prof Mbogho will be a member of Wadham College.