Mbarara → Kampala, Uganda · AI/NLP Engineer

I teach machines
to understand Uganda.

Computer Science student at Mbarara University of Science & Technology, currently building language AI at Sunbird AI fine-tuned translation models, evaluation infrastructure, and full-stack systems for the languages East Africa's tech usually leaves out.

View my work Download CV
github.com/SsemuliJoseph huggingface.co/SsemuliJoseph Email
sunflower_eval.py - zsh
17.84
BLEU · EN→LUG
6,000+
Audio Clips Labeled
3
Models on HF Hub
“

Technology only matters when it speaks the language of the person using it a farmer in Ateso, a market vendor in Luganda, a nurse texting in Runyankole. Those are the systems I want to build.

— JOSEPH, ON WHY HE BUILDS FOR AFRICAN LANGUAGES
About

Look back and thank God, Look forward and trust Him.

Joseph Ssemuli at the Fort Portal City Marathon finish area, wearing a finisher's medal
Fort Portal City Marathon, 5KM FinisherJuly 2026 · community data-collection fieldwork with Sunbird AI & DataCities

Joseph Ssemuli is a Computer Science student at Mbarara University of Science and Technology and an AI/NLP engineering intern at Sunbird AI, where he builds language technology for Uganda's underserved languages.

His work sits at the intersection of rigorous software engineering and a genuine curiosity about how Ugandans actually speak including Luglish, the English–Luganda code-switching common in everyday conversation, which he is researching for his dissertation. He moves comfortably from fine-tuning transformer models in Python to shipping full-stack systems in Java and PHP, treating both as the same discipline: understanding a problem well enough to build something people can rely on.

Outside of shipped code, he's a technical mentor with the MUST Computing Community, an active member of the Google Developers Community at MUST, and a maintainer of several open-source repositories because he'd rather leave the ecosystem more documented than he found it.

Based In
Mbarara / Kampala, Uganda
Studying
BSc Computer Science, MUST
Focus
NLP for African languages
Currently
AI Engineering Intern, Sunbird AI
Experience · Sunbird AI · Jun–Jul 2026

Eight weeks inside a live African AI research lab.

Sunbird AI is a Kampala-based non-profit AI lab whose Sunflower assistant supports 67 African languages and has served thousands of translation requests across 93+ organisations. Joseph joined the research and engineering team as an intern, reporting to Software Engineering Lead Walukagga Patrick — progressing from onboarding to owning one of the team's now-active production tools.

W1JUN 8
8 – 12 June 2026

Onboarding & Foundations

Joined the research and engineering team, completed the Git By Bit practical course and the full HuggingFace LLM Course with transformer architectures, fine-tuning strategies, tokenisation, and GRPO theory and stood up the Sunbird developer environment.

GitTransformersGRPO Theory
W2JUN 15
15 – 19 June 2026

English–Luganda Translation Pipeline

Curated a golden evaluation set on Argilla, fine-tuned NLLB-200 (distilled 600M) to a 17.84 BLEU score, ran QLoRA parameter-efficient fine-tuning on Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct cutting trainable parameters from 1.5B to ~6.8M and shipped a live Gradio translator to Hugging Face Spaces.

NLLB-200QLoRABLEU 17.84Gradio
NLLB model on HF QLoRA adapter Live demo
W3JUN 22
22 – 26 June 2026

Reinforcement Learning & UAT

Built a complete GRPO reinforcement-learning pipeline for SmolLM-135M with custom word-overlap reward functions the same alignment technique behind DeepSeek-R1 then ran WhatsApp bot UAT across ten categories, from language-switching to prompt-injection resistance.

GRPOTRLUAT Testing
SmolGRPO on HF
W4JUN 29
29 June – 3 July 2026

Evaluation Pipeline Design & CampusGPT

Designed the Sunflower Automated Evaluation Pipeline Executor, Scorer and Regression Runner after Sunbird's Dr. John Quinn flagged that manual testing couldn't scale. Also published model documentation for Sunflower-14B-GGUF and Sunflower-32B on the SALT platform, and shipped CampusGPT Uganda, a RAG-backed university assistant.

Eval PipelineRAG · ChromaDBUnsloth
Sunflower-14B docs Sunflower-32B docs CampusGPT on GitHub
W5JUL 6
6 – 10 July 2026

Pipeline Refinement

Curated the structured JSON test dataset behind the evaluation pipeline from Sunflower beta-test results and feedback logs, filed the WhatsApp and Web Chat UAT reports, and ran Sunflower's GRPO inference stack on vast.ai GPU infrastructure.

Test Designvast.ai
W6JUL 13
13 – 17 July 2026

Shipping & Audio Annotation Begins

Pushed the finished evaluation pipeline to Sunbird AI's GitHub org — now in active use by the team and began annotating the Entebbe urban noise dataset for the Environmental Sensing project, studying the underlying acoustic-taxonomy research first.

Shipped to ProdAudio Annotation
Evaluation pipeline repo
W7JUL 20
20 – 24 July 2026

SAHARA Benchmarking

Implemented direction-specific SAHARA benchmark tasks across African–African, English–African and French–African translation pairs, and mapped language overlap between the SAHARA benchmark and Sunflower's 67-language inventory.

SAHARABenchmarking
W8JUL 27
27 – 31 July 2026

Results & Fieldwork

Ran the full SAHARA benchmark on Sunflower-14B and Sunflower-9B with the team, closed out annotation at 6,000 audio clips and the weekend before, represented Sunbird AI at the Fort Portal City Marathon, collecting community survey data with DataCities and the City Council.

Sunflower-14BSunflower-9BFieldwork
SAHARA results repo
Selected Work

Notable projects.

A mix of applied AI, full-stack systems, and collaborative builds each one shipped, not just scaffolded.

Live

Healthcare No-Show Predictor

A Scikit-learn model predicting patient no-shows for hospital scheduling, addressing real resource wastage. Deployed as an interactive Streamlit app.

PythonScikit-learnStreamlit
Live app
Live

NLLB Luganda Translator

Fine-tuned NLLB-200 for direct English→Luganda translation, reaching a 17.84 BLEU score, with a public model card and a live Gradio demo.

NLLB-200BLEU 17.84
HuggingFace
Shipped

CampusGPT Uganda

A domain-specific assistant for MUST built with QLoRA fine-tuning via Unsloth and a ChromaDB RAG pipeline, deployed as a GGUF model with a live Gradio Space.

QLoRARAGGGUF
GitHub
Shipped

SmolGRPO-135M

A full GRPO reinforcement-learning pipeline fine-tuning SmolLM-135M for summarisation with custom reward functions the alignment technique behind DeepSeek-R1.

GRPOTRL
HuggingFace
Open Source

Train Reservation System

A booking engine in Java featuring automated seat-allocation logic and real-time transaction processing to streamline transport logistics.

JavaOOP Design
GitHub
Open Source

Career-Hub

A full-stack job-matching platform with secure authentication, built to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity in the local labour market.

PHPMySQL
GitHub
Open Source

Task-Flow

A dynamic task-management application with real-time state management, built to optimise personal workflow and organisational efficiency.

JavaScriptCSS
GitHub
Collaboration

Citizen Voice Sentiment Tracker

A collaborative system for collecting and analysing citizen feedback, aligned with Sunbird AI's Citizen Feedback project portfolio area.

NLPSentiment Analysis
GitHub
Collaboration

Sunflower Translator

A collaborative translation tool built on top of the Sunflower multilingual model family.

TranslationTeam Build
GitHub
Collaboration

Digital Extension Worker

A collaborative tool exploring AI-assisted agricultural extension services for local farming communities.

AI for AgTeam Build
GitHub
Open Source

Actively shipping and maintaining in the open.

Every project below is public, documented, and built to be read by someone else. That's deliberate Joseph maintains model cards, READMEs, and issue threads with the same care as the code itself.

TrainBookingSystem Career-hub Task-Flow CampusGPT_Uganda nllb-luganda-baseline qwen2.5-1.5b-luganda-lora SmolGRPO-135M sunird-automatic-evaluation-pipeline
View GitHub profile View Hugging Face models
Capabilities

What's in the stack.

01 · AI & Machine Learning
  • PyTorch & Transformers
  • LoRA / QLoRA / PEFT
  • GRPO (RLHF-style alignment)
  • RAG · ChromaDB
  • Scikit-learn · Pandas · NumPy
  • Predictive modelling
02 · Languages
  • Python
  • Java
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • C
03 · Web & Data
  • Django
  • MySQL
  • HTML5 & CSS3
  • Asynchronous programming
  • Data visualisation
04 · Tooling
  • Git & GitHub
  • Hugging Face Hub / Spaces
  • Docker
  • Linux environments
  • Jupyter / Colab
Recognition

Achievements & certifications.

Certified achievements link out to their original issuer for verification, or open the certificate directly.

Education

Academic path.

2024 — Present

Mbarara University of Science & Technology

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
IN PROGRESS
2022 — 2023

St. Mark's College Namagoma

Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education
COMPLETED
2017 — 2020

St. Mark's College Namagoma

Uganda Certificate of Education
COMPLETED
2010 — 2016

St. Joseph's Primary School, Nabbingo

Primary Leaving Examinations Certificate
COMPLETED
Get In Touch

Open to AI/NLP internships, research collaborations & software roles.

Based in Mbarara & Kampala, Uganda, happy to work remotely or relocate. The fastest way to reach me is email; I usually reply within a day.

Say hello Download CV
Email 2024bcs152@std.must.ac.ug
GitHub SsemuliJoseph
Hugging Face SsemuliJoseph
Location Mbarara, Uganda