Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

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 and aims to bridge the gap in the need for equitable language technologies in underserved communities. 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.

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🏆 Awards & Recognitions

My research and community contributions have received several awards at top-tier venues, recognizing impactful work in multilingual and African language technologies.

Explore My Research

Discover my full list of publications in leading NLP and AI venues.

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Media Coverage

Selected highlights from major outlets that have featured my research, datasets, and community initiatives.

📢 Latest Updates

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.
Oct 15, 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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Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

🏆 Awards & Recognitions

Best Resource Paper — ACL 2025

Best Task Award — SemEval 2025 (ACL 2025)

Outstanding Paper — NAACL 2025

Best Paper — Deep Learning Indaba 2025

Best Non-archival Paper — NeurIPS 2024 (C3NLP Workshop)

Honourable Mention — SemEval 2024

Best Non-archival Paper — AfricaNLP 2023 (Kigali)

Area Chair Award — IJCNLP–AACL 2023

Wikimedia Research Award — EMNLP 2020 (Findings)

Explore My Research

Media Coverage

Label Studio Blog: Empowering NLP in Low-Resource Languages

Imperial College News: Computing Welcomes Dr. Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Google DeepMind Fellow

Science Magazine: African Researchers Reclaim AI for Local Languages

IRCAI Global Top 100: Outstanding AI Projects Advancing the SDGs

📢 Latest Updates