Hi There 👋, I’m Catherine Gitau from Nairobi, Kenya. I currently work as a Data Science Manager at Visa Inc. and previously worked as an NLP Engineer at ProtoCX training multilingual chatbots for contact centers.

I completed my Masters’ in Machine Intelligence at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences(AIMS) under the African Masters’ in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) program. I also have a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.

While pursuing my Masters’ I joined the DSFSI Research Group where I worked on textual data augmentation techniques for low-resource Machine Translation supervised by Dr. Vukosi Marivate.

I’m part of a team that’s building something really cool for African languages. Imagine if your computer could talk to you in your own language – that’s what we’re trying to make possible. We built a Machine Translation platform for African Languages that’s free and open sourced. Feel free to play around with the platform here and provide feedback on the translations which will help in improving the translation models.

I enjoy finding and building solutions to practical real-life problems using data. I am really not sure which title to give myself; part data scientist part machine learning engineer and part applied research scientist 🤷‍♀. My current goal is to get acquainted with Machine Learning Operations(MLOps) so that I can build end-to-end machine learning systems that are able to serve people at scale.

My current interests are in Natural Language Processing for low-resourced languages, understanding Graph Networks and recommendation systems. I’ll try as much as possible to write about my learnings on these topics and more!

Outside of work, I’m trying my best to read as many books as possible and would like to go back to sharing what I have learned.

Timeline

Nov 2021 - Present: Manager, Data Science @ Visa Inc.

Feb 2020 - 2021: NLP Engineer @ ProtoCX

Sept 2020 - Present: Research Fellow @ DSFSI Research Group(Machine Translation Service for African Languages)

Apr 2018 - June 2021: Data Scientist @ Africa’s Talking(Analytics, CLV)

Jan 2019 - Aug 2019: Deep Learning Indaba(Organizing Commitee)

Oct 2017 - April 2018: Junior Data Scientist @ Ongair Limited

June 2017 - Oct 2017: Data Science Intern @ Brave Venture Labs