CV

Basics

Name Ibrahim Said Ahmad
Label Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
Email ibrahimsaidahmad@outlook.com
Url https://isahmadbbr.github.io
Summary Computer scientist and NLP researcher specializing in natural language processing for low-resource languages, computational social science, and cross-cultural AI. Co-founder of HausaNLP and Arewa Data Science, with 10+ years of experience in teaching, research, and interdisciplinary collaboration across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Published 40+ peer-reviewed papers, several recognized with best paper and best resource paper awards, and secured over $800,000 in competitive research grants.

Work

  • 2025.08 - Present

    Stevens Point, WI, USA

    Assistant Professor, Department of Computing and New Media Technologies
    University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
    Teaching, mentoring, and research in emotion-aware, culturally-informed AI.
    • Co-leading WARAKA, an open annotation platform and playbook for African-language datasets, as Co-PI on the Masakhane African Languages Hub grant.
    • Co-developed POLAR, a 23,000+ instance benchmark for multilingual, multicultural online polarization detection, and co-organized the SemEval-2026 shared task built on it.
    • Contributed to PLACES, a participatory red-teaming study and dataset for text-to-image safety in the Global South, published at FAccT 2026.
  • 2023.07 - 2025.07

    Portland, ME, USA

    Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Experiential AI
    Northeastern University
    Research at the intersection of NLP and computational social science, focused on low-resource languages and cross-cultural AI.
    • Co-developed BRIGHTER, a human-annotated emotion dataset for 28 languages (18 African); published at ACL 2025 (Best Resource Paper Award) with a companion SemEval 2025 shared task (Best Task Paper Award).
    • Developed AfriHate, the first labelled hate speech dataset for 18 African languages from 6 countries.
    • Studied cross-cultural emotion representation in LLMs; published at ACII 2024 (Best Paper Award).
  • 2020.01 - 2023.01

    Kano, Nigeria

    Senior Lecturer (U.S. equiv. Assistant Professor)
    Bayero University Kano
    Taught and researched AI, machine learning, and database systems; mentored graduate students.
    • Developed NaijaSenti, the first large-scale annotated Twitter sentiment corpus for the four main Nigerian languages.
    • Built and annotated a Twitter dataset on COVID-19 vaccination sentiment in Nigerian cyberspace.
  • 2014.01 - 2016.01

    Kano, Nigeria

    Assistant Lecturer
    Bayero University Kano
    Promoted to Lecturer II in 2017 while on PhD study fellowship.

Education

  • 2016.03 - 2020.04

    Malaysia

    PhD
    Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
    Dissertation: Purchase Intention Mining Approach for Movie Revenue Prediction
  • 2013.01 - 2015.01

    Malaysia

    MSc
    The University of Nottingham
    Dissertation: Engaging Children with ADHD using Mobile Games
  • 2006.01 - 2012.01

    Nigeria

    BSc
    Bayero University Kano

Awards

Publications

Languages

English
Fluent
Hausa
Fluent
Malay
Working proficiency
Arabic
Working proficiency

Skills

Natural Language Processing
Low-resource language processing
Sentiment analysis
Hate speech detection
Emotion analysis
Machine Learning
Deep learning
Transfer learning
Predictive modeling
Large language models
Programming & Tools
Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Pandas, NumPy
Git, Google Cloud, Jupyter Notebooks, Hugging Face Transformers
Research & Academic
Experimental design and implementation
Grant writing and management
Cross-cultural collaborative research