Edward Ajayi

Edward Ajayi

Machine Learning Engineer / NLP Research Associate

Spatial & Language Technologies Lab • Carnegie Mellon University

MSc in Engineering Artificial Intelligence, CMU '26

Computational Humor LLM Evaluation Multimodal ML Socially Aware AI

About

I am a Research Associate at the Spatial and Language Technologies Lab, Carnegie Mellon University. I investigate how structured representations and reasoning processes can be incorporated into neural language models for computational humor generation, LLM evaluation, and multimodal ML. My work focuses on how models capture and manipulate meaning, particularly in settings that require compositionality, contextual interpretation, and nuanced semantic shifts. More broadly, I am interested in developing cognitively grounded approaches to machine intelligence that improve interpretability, generalization, and alignment with human reasoning.

Recent Publications

E. Ajayi, M. Kachweka, M. Deku, and E. Aiken
AAAI AI in Medicine and Healthcare Bridge 2026 (Oral)
E. Ajayi, B. Tadele, E. Umwari, M. Deku, P. Singadi, C. Edeh, and J. Udahemuka
Accepted to Deep Learning Indaba 2026
E. Ajayi and P. Mitra
Accepted to CLEF 2026 JOKER Track

Selected Projects

HumorGen: Open-Weight Computational Humor Generation

humorgen.pages.dev · Hugging Face Model Collection · 14 models · 2026

HumorGen is our open-weight ecosystem for computational humor — six comedic personas, 14 LoRA adapters (EN · FR · ES), built with Cognitive Synergy distillation. Explore models and benchmarks at humorgen.pages.dev, with details in the HumorGen paper.

Humor LLM Open Weights Hugging Face

HumorRank: Humor Generation Leaderboard for LLMs

Live leaderboard · Web · 2026

HumorRank is our tournament-based leaderboard web app for evaluating humor generation across LLMs. Explore the live site at humorrank-leaderboard.pages.dev, with details in the HumorRank paper.

Humor Evaluation LLM Leaderboard

Multilabel ML System for Mental Health & Cyberbullying Detection

AAAI-26 AIMedHealth Oral • 2026

Built a full ML pipeline for multilabel detection of mental health conditions and cyberbullying using classical models and transformer-based embeddings. Results led to an Oral paper acceptance at AAAI-26 AIMedHealth.

Machine Learning NLP BERT AAAI-26 AIMedHealth Oral

CMU-Africa NLP Research Group

Live site · Web App · 2026

Official portal for the CMU-Africa NLP Research Group — featuring a public research showcase, member dashboard, and collaboration system for researchers working on African language technologies and responsible AI.

NLP Research Community Web App African Languages

AfriEconQA: Benchmark QA Dataset for African Economics

Research Project • 2026

Specialized benchmark dataset to close the "parametric knowledge gap" in AI economic analysis. Built 4,309 curated QA pairs from 220 World Bank African Reports (64,892 retrieval chunks).

Dataset Engineering LLM Evaluation RAG Benchmark

AI Workflow Automation Agent

EdGE AI Labs • Jul 2025

Autonomous agent for business process automation using Google Forms/Sheets, LangChain, and FastAPI. Integrated email notifications and QA monitoring dashboard.

Python LangChain FastAPI RAG

Recent Highlights

CLEF 2026 JOKER Winner

Our submission won the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 4: Humor Generation across all 3 languages (English, French, and Spanish).

Research & Engineering Role

Started as a NLP Research Associate at the Spatial and Language Technologies Lab at Carnegie Mellon University (June 2026).

CMU-Africa NLP Talk

Gave a talk with the CMU-Africa NLP Group on "Beyond the Transformer: How Modern NLP Research actually uses Foundation Models" (May 2026).

Best Paper Award

Mental health & cyberbullying detection paper received Best Paper Award at AAAI AIMedHealth Bridge 2026.

Seeking PhD Opportunities (Fall 2026)

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.