Joining TU Delft in January 2027 as Assistant Professor in the Web Information Systems group — I am looking for students.

About Me

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. In January 2027, I will join the Web Information Systems (WIS) group at Delft University of Technology as an Assistant Professor.

My research lies at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Human–AI Interaction. I am interested in how we evaluate AI systems, whether existing evaluation methods reflect human needs and judgments, and how reliable these methods are across different tasks, languages, and contexts. My work spans human-centered evaluation, LLM-based evaluation, and responsible and trustworthy AI.

I received my PhD from the University of Amsterdam in July 2025, under the supervision of Maarten de Rijke and Mohammad Aliannejadi. My thesis is titled Rethinking the Human-Centered Evaluation of Conversational Systems. Before that, I completed my MSc at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AMMI) in Rwanda and my BSc at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya.

I serve on the board of the Masakhane Research Foundation, which supports research on NLP for African languages. I also co-organize the AfricaNLP workshops.

Research Interests

  • Human-centered evaluation of AI systems
  • Evaluation of and with large language models
  • Conversational search and information retrieval
  • Multilingual and cross-cultural NLP, with a focus on African languages
  • Responsible and trustworthy AI

Selected Publications

See all publications

News and Activities

  • January 2027 – Will join the Web Information Systems (WIS) group at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) as an Assistant Professor.
  • 2027 – Will be co-organizing the AfricaNLP workshop at EACL 2027.
  • 2026 – Paper accepted at Findings of EMNLP 2026: “When More Metadata Misleads: Probing Field-Level Grounding in LLM-Generated Museum Descriptions” (with Laura Hollink).
  • 2026 – Papers published at EACL 2026 (Findings), LREC 2026 and ACL 2026 (Findings); AGENT-CQ published in ACM TOIS.
Show older news
  • July 2025 – Co-organized the AfricaNLP workshop at ACL 2025.
  • July 2025 – Successfully defended my PhD thesis.
  • July 2025 – Organized the LLM4Eval workshop at SIGIR 2025.
  • May 2025 – Began my postdoctoral research position at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI).
  • December 2024 – 1 paper accepted for presentation at CHIIR 2025.
  • November 2024 – Visiting researcher at the Machine Learning group, University of Copenhagen.
  • September 2024 – Delivered an invited talk at Glasgow IRTalks on “Rethinking Human-Centered Evaluation of Conversational Systems.”
  • July 2024 – Organized the LLM4Eval workshop at SIGIR 2024.
  • May 2024 – Co-organized AfricaNLP workshop at ICLR 2024.
  • May 2023 – Co-organized AfricaNLP workshop at ICLR 2023.
  • September 2022 – Invited guest speaker for the Master AI program at the University of Amsterdam, presenting on evaluation of dialogue systems with users.
  • 2022 to present – Mentor for Master AI students at the University of Amsterdam.
  • 2019 to present – Active member of MasakhaneNLP, a collaborative research community focused on NLP for African languages.

Organization and Leadership

  • Board member

    Masakhane Research Foundation

    Supporting research on NLP for African languages.

  • Workshop co-organizer

    AfricaNLP Workshop on African Natural Language Processing

    ICLR 2023, ICLR 2024 (proposal), ACL 2025, EACL 2026 (proceedings, co-editor) and EACL 2027.

  • Workshop co-organizer

    LLM4Eval: Large Language Models for Evaluation in Information Retrieval

    SIGIR 2024 and SIGIR 2025. Also WSDM 2025.

  • Workshop co-organizer

    First Workshop on Tailoring AI: Active and Passive LLM Personalization (PALS 2025)

    Proceedings co-editor for PALS 2025.