Edward Ajayi

Edward Ajayi

NLP Researcher

MSc in Engineering AI • Carnegie Mellon University Africa

Mastercard Foundation Scholar • President, CMU-Africa Research Club

Socially Aware AI Multimodal Reasoning Computational Humor Human-AI Interaction

About

I am a Master’s student in Engineering AI at Carnegie Mellon University Africa and a Mastercard Foundation Scholar. As a research assistant in Prof. Prasenjit Mitra’s Spatial and Language Technologies Lab, I investigate how AI can better understand and interact with humans. My work spans human-AI interaction, socially aware and multimodal AI, humor generation and detection, and AI applications for mental health, with the goal of creating intelligent systems that are both effective and socially responsible.

Recent Publications

A Machine Learning Approach for Detection of Mental Health Conditions and Cyberbullying from Social Media
E. Ajayi, M. Kachweka, M. Deku, and E. Aiken
AAAI AIHealth Bridge 2026 (Oral)
Automatic Humor Detection: From Theoretical Foundations to LLMs
E. Ajayi and P. Mitra
Submitted to ACM
Language Diversity: Evaluating AI Performance on African Languages
E. Ajayi, B. Tadele, E. Umwari, M. Deku, P. Singadi, C. Edeh, and J. Udahemuka
Preprint, 2025

Selected Projects

Recent Highlights

Cohere Connect Conference

Attended Cohere Connect Conference (Nov 2025)

AAAI AIHealth Bridge 2026

Paper accepted for Oral Presentation (Nov 2025)

Research Assistant

Started at Spatial and Language Technologies Lab (Aug 2025)

Seeking PhD Opportunities (Fall 2025)

Research Focus: Socially Aware AI • Grounded & Multimodal Reasoning • Human-AI Interaction

I'm applying to PhD programs to advance research in socially intelligent AI that communicates with social awareness, reasons across modalities, and generalizes beyond linguistic boundaries—moving toward AI systems that think and collaborate more like humans.