Eric Wairagala
Research Engineer · Lelapa AI · African Language AI
I build NLP systems for African languages — speech recognition, machine translation, and low-resource models in production at Lelapa AI's Vulavula platform. My research covers gender bias in MT, named entity recognition, and explainable AI for low-resource settings.
Experience
Building the Vulavula platform — Africa's leading multilingual language AI service. Multilingual speech-to-text with native code-switching, machine translation for low-resource Bantu languages, and resource-efficient models deployed for enterprise clients in telecoms and financial services.
Technical Skills
Featured Projects
Uganda Community Health Bot
Health chatbot in Luganda, Acholi & English using Sunbird Sunflower-14B. Emergency detection with instant local responses.
Production RAG with Citations
Hybrid search (dense + BM25), cross-encoder reranking, LangGraph pipeline. Returns page-level citations.
Model Drift Monitor
Continuously probes a model and detects semantic, behavioral & latency drift. Warning/critical alerts.
Selected Work
View all publications →Education
Medical machine translation and explainable AI for low-resource African languages. Supervised by Dr. Rose Nakasi (main) and Dr. Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende.
Get in Touch
I'm actively looking for PhD positions in NLP / low-resource language AI, and open to research collaborations and senior ML engineering roles.