Boda AI
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Our team

The people behind the work

A small team of researchers and engineers working across data science, computer vision, and speech and language technology, based in Kampala.

  • Portrait of Mutembesa Daniel

    Mutembesa Daniel

    Co-founder & COO — Data Science & Operations

    A research scientist, project principal investigator, and collaborations lead at the Makerere Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. Over ten years, his focus has been impactful AI applications across Africa. His PhD work in Computer Science addresses multi-objective optimization and algorithmic mechanism design in resource-constrained contexts.

    Research highlights from his PhD work

    • Large-scale datasets for crop and livestock disease-vector surveillance
    • Multi-objective optimization strategies for deploying mobile sensors
    • Social-knowledge-informed credit scoring for SMEs, extended to algorithmic fairness in equitable digital micro-credit and micro-insurance design
  • Portrait of Solomon Nsumba

    Solomon Nsumba

    Co-founder — Data Science & Computer Vision

    Technical Lead at the Makerere AI Health Lab and a Software Engineer at Sunbird AI working on machine translation and language technology for Ugandan languages, and on applied AI for public health and urban sensing. He has successfully defended his PhD in Computer Science and graduates in February 2027. He also holds an MSc in Data Communications and Software Engineering and a BSc in Software Engineering, both from Makerere University, and was an exchange fellow at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School (2022–2023).

    Research highlights from his roles at Makerere AI Health Lab, Sunbird AI, and the University of Washington

    • An AI-enabled wearable camera system for detecting medication errors, with University of Washington researchers
    • Ocular, a smartphone-based diagnostic microscopy tool for malaria, tuberculosis, and cervical-cancer screening
    • SALT-31, an open machine translation benchmark for 31 Ugandan languages
    • Sunflower, multilingual language models for Ugandan languages
    • Urban-Noise-Uganda-61K, an open acoustic dataset of Kampala and Entebbe
  • Portrait of Jonathan Mukiibi

    Jonathan Mukiibi

    Co-founder — Speech & Language Technology

    A research scientist focused on artificial intelligence for social impact and a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He currently works with the Makerere Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Mozilla Common Voice project.

    Research highlights

    • Speech recognition models for social listening to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals, with UN Global Pulse
    • Research on addressing gender bias in automatic speech recognition
    • Inclusive, privacy-conscious open-source speech datasets for low-resourced languages, with Mozilla Common Voice
    • Research on morphological complexity in children's speech, supporting multilingual transfer learning for inclusive education tools, with Oracle Research

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