2021-06-30: My Journey to ODU WS-DL Group

My name is Kehinde (Kenny) Ajayi. I had my undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Lagos in Nigeria. After my bachelors, I developed an interest in the applications of the mathematical concepts learnt, which propelled me to further my studies in Statistics at the Montana State University where I focused on the application of machine learning to textual data.

After completing my Masters program, I did a research fellowship with the Applied Machine Learning group at LANL where I worked on combining machine learning techniques with human-derived knowledge to extract information from text data. Specifically, we integrated Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO) into topic models built with Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Algorithm to extract information from Covid-19 Open Research Data (CORD-19).

I am currently doing my Ph.D at the Computer Science department at Old Dominion University. I started working with Dr. Wu in the Spring 2021. Prior to joining the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Lab, I worked as a data scientist in Nigeria (Ailead Technologies), where I primarily built machine learning models for clients in several sectors. One of the projects I worked on was using sequence to sequence machine learning models such as Bidirectional Long-Short-Term-Memory (BiLSTM) combined with pre-trained models such as gloVe embeddings to classify location events into categories such as riot, clash, murder, etc.

My research interests are but not limited to Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). I am currently working on data integration and named entity recognition and relation extraction with an application to materials science domain. 

Kenny Ajayi

Ph.D student, ODU