David Ifeoluwa Adelani

David Ifeoluwa Adelani is an Assistant Professor at McGill University, Core Academic Member at Mila – Quebec AI Institute, an IVADO Professor, and a Canada AI CIFAR Chair. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Saarland University, Germany, where he was supervised by Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow, and awarded the Dr. Eduard-Martin Outstanding Doctoral Prize. Prior to his appointment at McGill University, he was a Post-doctoral Google DeepMind Academic Fellow at University College London, United Kingdom. His research focuses on multilingual natural language processing and speech processing for under-resourced languages such as African languages and native Americas languages. His work has garnered over 4,000 citations, and has won several paper awards at top NLP conferences such as the Best Paper Award (Grand Challenges) at COLING 2022, Area Chair Award at IJCNLP-AACL 2023, Best Resource Paper Award at ACL 2025, Outstanding Paper Award and Best Theme Paper Award at NAACL 2025. He is one of the Directors of the Masakhane Research Foundation—a  grassroots organization whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

AI2050 Project

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are now part of our daily lives, with applications across various sectors such as education, health, and more. Despite significant progress of LLMs, their generation capabilities and task-solving abilities remain mostly limited to English and a few high-resource languages. Adelani’s project will focus on developing data- and compute-efficient methods to scale multilingual LLMs and language technologies to hundreds of low-resource languages in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas regions. They aim to leverage multimodal resources—texts, images, and speech—to create language technologies that support diverse, real-world applications in fields such as education and health.