#### Profile: Dr Ignatius Majesty Ezeani ##### Introduction I started my teaching career in 2003 at Nnamdi Azikiwe University as a graduate assistant and have progressed through the ranks. I am currently a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science department at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka Nigeria. Through the collaboration of Nnamdi Azikiwe University Nig and Lancaster University UK, I also work as a Senior Research Associate with the UCREL NLP research lab at Lancaster University where I work on projects to support the resource creation and computational processing of low-resource languages including Igbo and other African languages. I hold a PhD (2019) in Computer Science (Natural Language Processing) and my recent research and collaboration efforts have produced a collection of good impact papers (see my [GScholar profile](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=flSvPiMAAAAJ&hl=en)). I have recently collaborated with others on projects and papers presented at major NLP venues like the Association of Computational Linguists (ACL), Empirical Methods in NLP (EMNLP) and Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD), Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) as well as in the Transactions of ACL (TACL) journal. ##### Grants and Projects I was the lead developer on the Welsh Text Summarizer and Welsh FreeTxt projects, a £180k Cardiff-Lancaster collaboration project. I led the creation of the Igbo-English MT benchmark dataset, a $23k Facebook-funded project. I am part of Masakhane Initiative, the most vibrant AfricanNLP research community where I am also leading a Google-backed Question Answering dataset creation project for Igbo. Currently, I am working on an approximately £1m Spatial and Temporal Narratives project in Digital Humanities where we are developing NLP techniques for understanding the Lake District and Holocaust writings. ##### Teaching and Supervision During my PhD, I was a Graduate Teaching Assistant on a number of computer science modules at Sheffield University. At Lancaster University in 2020-21, I co-taught SCC.361 (Artificial Intelligence) and SCC.413 (Data Mining/NLP module). In 2021-22, I co-taught the SCC.120 (Fundamentals of Computer Science) and SCC.460 (Data Science Fundamentals). I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and working towards Senior Fellow (SFHEA). In addition to my successful supervision of several undergraduate and MSc students, I am currently co-supervising a PhD student at Lancaster University and an MSc student at Nnamdi Azikiwe University. I have encouraged many junior colleagues join us at Lancaster to leverage the facilities and resources our lab provides and 3 additional PhD applications from my advisees have been successfully processed by Lancaster University. ##### Administration and Community Service I have participated in departmental administration including curriculum and module design processes. I have been on the Technical Advisory Panel of the Lacuna Fund granting over $1m in 2021 and 2022 to fund the creation of AfricanNLP datasets. I am currently a member of the departmental committee and the faculty representative on the EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) initiative which supports minority groups at Lancaster University. I was part of the Teaching Assistants Coordination team in the School of Computing and Communication, the widening participation and EDI efforts at Lancaster University. I am also a member of the Institutional Self-Assessment and Team (ISAT) led by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof Steve Bradley working for LU’s Race Equality Charter award. Thanks for stopping by and please kindly contact me if you require any further details. I am open to multidisciplinary research collaboration and grant applications. Kind regards, **Ignatius Majesty Ezeani** [email protected] [email protected]

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Artificial Intelligence Data Science Digital Humanities Machine Learning Natural Language Processing