PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

David Ifeoluwa Adelani

David Ifeoluwa Adelani is a computer scientist who builds multilingual natural language and speech technologies for low-resource languages. He was first author of the MasakhaNER dataset for ten African languages in 2021, coauthored African news translation and multilingual adaptive fine-tuning studies in 2022, and completed a computer science PhD under Dietrich Klakow at Saarland University in 2023. From 2022 to 2024, he served as a postdoctoral Google DeepMind Academic Fellow at University College London, receiving the IJCNLP-AACL Area Chair Award in 2023 after winning a Web Conference poster award in 2019 and a COLING best paper award in 2022. In 2024, he joined McGill University's School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor and became a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Core Academic Member at Mila, followed in 2025 by a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, ACL's Best Resource Paper Award for BRIGHTER, and the IrokoBench benchmark. As of October 2026, he is an Assistant Professor at McGill, a Core Academic Member at Mila and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and he coauthored the VoxSumm spoken-news corpus in August 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2019

    A Web Conference poster award

    In 2019, he wins the Best Poster Presentation Award at The Web Conference.

  2. 2021

    MasakhaNER for ten languages

    In 2021, he is first author of MasakhaNER, a paper that introduces a public named entity recognition dataset for ten African languages and releases its data, code and models.

  3. 2022

    African news translation and COLING

    In 2022, he coauthors a NAACL paper that creates an African news translation corpus covering 16 languages and a COLING paper on multilingual adaptive fine-tuning across 17 African languages and three widely spoken high-resource languages. He also wins the Grand Challenge Best Paper Award at COLING in 2022.

  4. 2022–2024

    A UCL fellowship and an award

    From 2022 to 2024, he serves as a postdoctoral Google DeepMind Academic Fellow at University College London. His research focuses on multilingual NLP and speech processing for low-resource languages, and his PhD work focuses on NLP for African languages. In 2023, he receives the Area Chair Award at IJCNLP-AACL.

  5. 2023

    A Saarland doctorate and prize

    In 2023, he receives his PhD in computer science from the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University under Dietrich Klakow, where he wins a Dr. Eduard-Martin Outstanding Doctoral Prize.

  6. 2024

    A Canada CIFAR AI Chair

    In 2024, he becomes a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Core Academic Member at Mila, announced in February 2024, while serving as an Assistant Professor in McGill University's School of Computer Science. His research develops machine-learning models for under-resourced languages.

  7. 2025

    AI2050 fellowship and 2025 benchmarks

    By 2025, he serves as one of the directors of the Masakhane Research Foundation, leads the human-translated IrokoBench benchmark for 17 African languages at NAACL 2025, and coauthors BRIGHTER, a 28-language emotion recognition dataset that wins ACL's Best Resource Paper Award in 2025. In 2025, his work also receives Outstanding Paper and Best Theme Paper awards at NAACL, and Schmidt Sciences names him an AI2050 Early Career Fellow in a cohort announced in November 2025. His fellowship project focuses on data- and compute-efficient methods to scale multilingual LLMs and language technologies to hundreds of low-resource languages across Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

  8. As of October 2026

    VoxSumm and current roles

    In August 2026, he coauthors VoxSumm, a multilingual corpus for joint summarization and translation of spoken news, with 10,045 BBC article-summary pairs across 24 languages and about 703 hours of speech. As of October 2026, he is an Assistant Professor in McGill University's School of Computer Science under the Fighting Inequities initiative, a Core Academic Member at Mila and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

Career

  1. Since 2024MilaCore Academic Member
  2. Since 2024CIFARCanada CIFAR AI Chair
  3. Since 2024McGill UniversityAssistant Professor
  4. 2022–2024University College LondonDeepMind Academic Fellow
  5. Masakhane Research FoundationDirector

Education

  1. Saarland UniversityPhD in computer science

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes David Ifeoluwa Adelani. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes McGill University. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Mila. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes McGill University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. David Ifeoluwa Adelani – CIFAR cifar.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. About, David Ifeoluwa Adelani dadelani.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. David Ifeoluwa Adelani - AI2050 ai2050.schmidtsciences.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. CV, David Ifeoluwa Adelani · David Adelani dadelani.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. David Ifeoluwa Adelani: Scaling Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs to Many Languages – CDH@Princeton cdh.princeton.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Professor David Ifeoluwa Adelani appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair mila.quebec. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Professor David Ifeoluwa Adelani Selected for Schmidt Sciences' AI2050 Fellowship Program mila.quebec. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  12. BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  13. David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 22 October 2026.
  14. David Adelani, Multilingual NLP & Speech dadelani.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.