About.
I’m passionate about innovation and driven by impact.
How do I turn my passion for technology to impact the local communities around me? This is a question that I’m looking forward to answering everyday. I understand that getting the best answer may be a lifelong journey. I wake up everyday to find better ways that technological innovation can improve our communities.
INNOVATOR. TECHNOLOGIST.
FRIEND.
I am a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer with over five years of experience in building and deploying comprehensive, end-to-end machine learning solutions. Currently based in Madeira, Portugal, my work is driven by a passion for applying advanced ML techniques to solve tangible, real-world problems. My expertise spans the full data science lifecycle, and my industry experience includes key roles that have sharpened my skills in building practical, user-centric AI products.
Since September 2023, I have been working as a Data Scientist at the Interactive Technologies Institute/LARSYS in Portugal. My current work centers on the critical challenge of energy demand forecasting. I've co-developed a lightweight time-series forecasting open-source python library to predict energy demand, a solution that successfully lowers inference costs by more than 60%. I also architected and developed a novel federated learning framework for real-time solar (PV) power forecasting across distributed energy systems. This privacy-centric approach allows for collaborative model training without compromising consumer data privacy and I am proud that a pilot was deployed in Madeira Island.
Before my current role, I worked as an ML Engineer at Belltro in Tanzania from November 2021 to August 2023. Here, I focused on revolutionizing Conversational AI and access to information. I led the development of a WhatsApp chatbot that delivers financial literacy and entrepreneurship education. A significant part of my work involved NLP for low-resource languages; I built and deployed a Swahili language news classification model and engineered the supporting infrastructure, including automated data pipelines for scraping, processing, and storing news data.
During my time as a Data Scientist at ParrotAI (Nov. 2019 - Nov. 2021), I served clients by tackling diverse data challenges. I reveled in the diverse challenges of creating AI models for a spectrum of applications. I worked to build solutions to aid farmers, creating the AI backend for a mobile app to detect banana leaves plant diseases using computer vision. I also assisted companies with reducing their data labeling time by customizing an open-source annotation tool to perform auto-annotating, slashing manual labeling efforts by 60%.
My professional career started at Vodacom (Apr. 2018 - Nov. 2019), where I worked as a Backend Engineer. This role provided a strong foundation in building scalable, high-impact systems. There, I maintained the backend for the main Vodacom website and mobile app, systems that served over 100,000 daily users. I also crafted applications like the AfyaCall Mini-app backend and created the backend system for Vodacom's 5G routers Online shop.
This practical experience is built on a solid academic foundation. I am a graduate of the University of Dodoma's Class of 2019, where I earned a BSc. in Software Engineering. I am now continuing my academic journey and pursuing an MSc. in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Madeira.
I am a passionate advocate for building and supporting tech communities. I am an active contributor to Masakhane NLP, working to advance NLP for African languages. I also founded the Google Developers Community (GDG) in Dodoma and co-founded the first machine learning student community at the University of Dodoma. My work has been recognized through awards, including being among the Winners of the AI4D (AI For Development) Africa Innovation (2019) and a Finalist in the Vodacom Digital Accelerator (2020).