Jun to Aug 2026
Research Fellow
LiGHT, EPFL
Lausanne, Switzerland
About me
Background, experience, publications and awards in one place.
Who I am
I'm an AI researcher and engineer working on reinforcement learning, robot learning and applied NLP. This summer I was a research fellow at LiGHT, EPFL in Switzerland, and before that an AI engineer at Bfree Africa. I taught as Adjunct Faculty at Pan Atlantic University until July 2026, and I was shortlisted for the ELLIS PhD Programme, one of Europe's most competitive doctoral tracks in AI.
I study how agents act well when information is unknown or incomplete, using reinforcement learning for single and multi agent systems. That includes drone navigation for finding plastic waste in rivers, the orienteering problem in unknown nodes, and MARL Gym, an open source platform for training multi agent systems. I've spoken at AMLD Africa, TEDx, Python Summit Warsaw, and ML Lagos, and I review papers for ICLR and ECCV workshops.
Being introverted has shaped how deliberately I communicate and how deeply I think. Quiet confidence, consequential work.
Experience
Feb to May 2026
AI Engineer
Bfree Africa
Lagos, Nigeria
Jan to Jul 2026
Adjunct Faculty
Pan Atlantic University
Lagos, Nigeria
Mar 2023 to Jan 2026
Machine Learning Engineer
Kochava
US, Remote
Apr to Aug 2024
ML Engineer, GenAI & LLMs
CJID
Abuja, Nigeria
Sep 2022 to Feb 2023
Machine Learning Engineer
Rural Farmers Hub
Abuja, Nigeria
Publications
African Cities Journal 2026Samuel Ibiyemi, Bunmi Akinremi and Jennifer Ilesan. Overcoming Degradation in African Low Cost Locomotive Sensors using RL (Special Issue)
Springer, under reviewDetector Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Waypoint Free UAV Navigation in a Simulated River Environment. Bunmi Akinremi, Ishaya Gambo, Chia Chen Lin, Rhodes Massenon, Samuel Okegbile, Hanaa A. Abdallah and Saurabh Agarwal
Interspeech 2025The NaijaVoices Dataset: Cultivating Large Scale, High Quality, Culturally Rich Speech Data for African Languages
DataCampOptuna for Deep Reinforcement Learning
DataCampStructural Equation Modelling
KagglePrinciples vs Implementation: AI Ethics
Neptune.aiBest Tools For Model Tuning and Hyperparameter Optimization
Honours and awards
2025
ELLIS PhD Programme, shortlisted
Top 400 out of 6,000+ applicants for one of Europe's most prestigious AI doctoral programmes.
Jun to Aug 2026, Lausanne, Switzerland
Research fellowship at LiGHT, EPFL
Selected for a research fellowship at EPFL's Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health Technologies.
Nov 2024
Research Grant £70k
French Embassy Fund, Plastic waste identification & transformation
2024
Black in AI Emerging Leaders
Top 127 from 590+ global applications
Oct 2022
NASA Space Apps Global Finalist
Top 10 globally out of 3,000+ participants
Nov 2022
Miss Algorithm
Top female AI expert, DSN AI Bootcamp