Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
Imperial College London. Google DeepMind Academic Fellow. Co-founder of HausaNLP. Founder of Arewa Data Science Academy.
I am a Google DeepMind Academic Fellow and an Advanced Research Fellow at Imperial College London. I also serve as an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) at the Faculty of Computing, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, and as a Visiting Professor at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cameroon and South Africa, as well as at York St John University.
I received my PhD from the University of Porto, Portugal, under the supervision of Professor Pavel Brazdil and Professor Alipio Jorge. Prior to that, I earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, UK, and a BSc in Computer Science from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria.
My research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low-resource African languages. I have published in top venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICLR, and NeurIPS. My work has received wide recognition and several best paper awards. I have served the research community in various leadership roles, including as Area Chair for ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP.
I am deeply passionate about diversity and inclusion. To further this cause, I co-founded the HausaNLP research group, which aims to advance research and development in the Hausa language, one of the most widely spoken languages in Africa. I also founded the Arewa Data Science Academy, which seeks to democratize data science and AI education by providing free data science and machine learning training to underserved students.
If you have any questions regarding my research or want to collaborate, feel free to contact me anytime.
🏆 Awards & Recognitions
My research and community contributions have received several awards at top-tier venues, recognizing impactful work in multilingual and African language technologies.
BRIGHTER: Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages
Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection
IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of LLMs
The State of Large Language Models for African Languages
BLEnD: Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languages
Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages
AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages
MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages
Participatory Research for Low-Resourced Machine Translation
🎖️ Full Awards & Honors
View complete list of awards, fellowships, grants, and recognitions.
View All Awards →Media Coverage
Selected highlights from major outlets that have featured my research, datasets, and community initiatives.
Label Studio Blog: Empowering NLP in Low-Resource Languages
Label Studio Blog — February 2025
Label Studio highlighted Dr. Shamsuddeen Muhammad and the HausaNLP team for advancing community-driven NLP for African languages through open annotation and ...
Imperial College News: Computing Welcomes Dr. Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Google DeepMind Fellow
Imperial College London News — February 2024
Science Magazine: African Researchers Reclaim AI for Local Languages
Science Magazine — January 2024
IRCAI Global Top 100: Outstanding AI Projects Advancing the SDGs
International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (UNESCO) — December 2023
📢 Latest Updates
| Dec 26, 2025 | I will be a speaker in the AI for Decision Making session at the 2026 U.S.–Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium, taking place from 2–4 February 2026 in Dakar, Senegal, organized by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. |
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| Dec 25, 2025 | I will deliver a keynote talk at the International Conference on the Integration of Artificial Intelligence in Language Education, to be held at Saadatu Rimi College of Education, Kumbotsi, Kano, Nigeria, on 2 February 2026. |
| Dec 23, 2025 | I will deliver a keynote talk at the MMLoSo Workshop at IJCNLP–AACL 2025 on 23 December 2025. |
| Dec 22, 2025 | I will deliver a talk at the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, on 11 February 2026. |
| Nov 25, 2025 | I will be speaking at Masakhane Community’s Weekly call on 12th December 2025 about AfricaNLP. Join us to learn more about our goals, and how you can get involved! Slides: AfricaNLP @ Masakhane Weekly Call |
| Nov 25, 2025 | I will be speaking at the Google Community Forum on Language Inclusion in AI, with a special focus on African languages on Thursday, 11 December 2025. Registrater here to attend |
| Nov 25, 2025 | I will be speaking at the Google Community Forum on Language Inclusion in AI, with a special focus on African languages on Thursday, 11 December 2025. Registrater here to attend |
| Oct 11, 2025 | I will be giving a talk at Microsoft Research Lab - Africa, Nairobi on 30th October 2025. |
| Aug 22, 2025 | 🏆 Our paper, “The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges”, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at Deep Learning Indaba (DLI)2025. DLI is the largest machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) gathering in Africa. The paper reveals that African languages remain significantly underrepresented in current language models. Out of over 2,000 languages, only about 42 have any support in existing LLMs, primarily those with large speaker populations or official status. Major challenges include severe data scarcity, morphological complexity, a lack of standardized orthographies, and limited computational resources. |
| Jul 31, 2025 | 🏆 Our paper “BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages” has been awarded the Best Resource Award at ACL 2025. See the project page for more details. ` |
| Jul 30, 2025 | 🏆 Our SemEval task “SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection” has been awarded the Best SemEval2025 Task Award at ACL 2025. |
| Jun 15, 2025 | I will be giving a keynote speech at Empowering India Through Inclusive Generative AI workshop on 5th July 2025. |
| Jun 15, 2025 | I will be giving a keynote speech at Empowering India Through Inclusive Generative AI workshop on 5th July 2025. |
| Jun 14, 2025 | I will be giving a keynote speech at Workshop on Multilingual and Equitable Language Technologies (MELT) on October 10, 2025 at Palais des Congrès, Montreal, Canada |
| Jun 07, 2025 | I will be giving a keynote speech at the York St John University on 19th June 2025. |
| Jun 04, 2025 | I will be teaching Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) Camerron from Febuary 23 to March 14, 2025. |
| Jun 02, 2025 | I will be teaching Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the AI for Science Master’s program at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in South Africa from November 24 to December 12, 2025. |
| May 05, 2025 | Two papers accepted at ACL2025 |
| May 05, 2025 | Four Papers Accepted at AfricaNLP 2025 |
| Mar 25, 2025 | Our paper IrokoBench received the Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico (April 30–May 7, 2025). |
| Mar 22, 2025 | I will be attending NACCL 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico (April 30–May 7, 2025) to present the AfriHate paper. |
| Dec 25, 2025 | |
| Feb 01, 2025 | Two papers accepted at NAACL2025 |
| Jun 01, 2024 | Co-Organizing SemEval-2025 Shared Task on Emotion Detection |
| Jan 18, 2024 | Joining Imperial College London as a Google DeepMind Academic Fellow |
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