CV

Curriculum vitae of Alex Gichamba — speech & NLP researcher at CMU Africa.

Contact Information

Name Alex Gichamba
Professional Title Speech & NLP Researcher
Email alexgichamba@ieee.org

Professional Summary

Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University Africa working on speech and NLP for African languages — ASR, TTS, machine translation, and speech-to-speech. Interested in spoofing-robust speaker representations, information retrieval, and LLMs for knowledge-intensive NLP.

Experience

  • 2024 - present

    Kigali, Rwanda

    Researcher
    Carnegie Mellon University Africa
    African-language speech and NLP — ASR, TTS, machine translation, and speech-to-speech.
    • Building open speech models and datasets for under-resourced languages via WakandaAI.
  • 2024 - 2024

    Remote

    Contributor — ESPnet-SPK
    WandB / Watanabe Group (ESPnet)
    • Co-authored ESPnet-SPK, a full-pipeline speaker embedding toolkit (Interspeech 2024).

Education

  • 2023 - 2024

    Pittsburgh, PA, USA / Kigali, Rwanda

    MS
    Carnegie Mellon University
    Electrical & Computer Engineering
    • Speech processing, speaker representation learning, and NLP.
  • 2017 - 2022

    Nairobi, Kenya

    BSc
    University of Nairobi
    Electrical & Electronics Engineering
    • Low-resource devices for LPWANs (advised by Dr. Cosmas Kiruki).

Selected Publications

Skills

Speech: ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speaker verification, anti-spoofing
NLP & ML: Machine translation, information retrieval, LLMs, PyTorch, ESPnet

Languages

English : Fluent
Swahili : Native speaker