Amelia V. Taylor

About Me

I am a computer scientist with a PhD in Mathematical Logic and over a decade of experience designing and deploying data-driven systems within the private and public-sector contexts.

I currently serve as a Senior Lecturer at the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS), where I teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules, supervise students and engage in research. I lead the development of postgraduate programmes in Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, and supervise doctoral research in computational modelling.

In my non-academic capacity, I provide consultancy services in technology/AI for law and financial modelling and investment. I also build technologies for preserving history and language and I am interested in the relationship between science and religion.

In 2022, I have founded the Kuyesera AI Lab to provide a space where researchers, students could explore how artificial intelligence can address Malawi challenges responsibly and effectively.

Research Interests

• Health Informatics: data collection, standardisation and harmonisation (FAIR,OMOP/OHDSI), federated data and learning, ETL pipelines, synthetic data.
• Natural Language Processing: information extraction, machine translation, speech to text, legal text, development of datasets.
• Machine Learning: applications of machine learning in various domains such as health, law, fraud detection.
• Computer Vision: OCR, video and image recognition and generation, video captioning.
• Technology and Law: development of legal corpora, pipelines for automatic annotation, ethical issues.
• Methodologies for teaching and research

Education

• [Nov. 2006] PhD in Mathematical Logic, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK (2006).
• [July. 2001] BSc (First Class Honours) in Computer Science, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Note. I advanced to a PhD straight from my undergraduate studies on the basis of my excellent undergraduate studies. I received a James Watt Scholarship for my PhD studies.

Employment history

• [Present] Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences. I have been instrumental in establishing new MSc programmes and modules in Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
• [2012 - Present] Consultant in technology, AI, knowledge management
• [2008 - 2012] Quantitative Investment Analyst, Alliance-Trust Ltd, UK. I developed risk and asset allocation models. The output from these models were used for investment and executive decisions.
• [2007 - 2008] Quantitative Investment Analyst, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, UK. I built models for pricing derivatives (i.e. interest rate swaps) for managing liability driven investments. Also developed and managed internal risk models for fixed-income trading.
• [2006 - 2007] DIAM Asset Management, City of London, UK. My role as a quantitative analysis focussed on developing mathematical and statistical modelling for understanding the behaviour of stock markets, and for stock valuation and market performance.
• [2005 - 2006] Research Assistant, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. Part of a research team from Heriot-Watt and the Royal Observatory working on the design of a database for astronomical data and on a query language for extracting that data.

Present and Past Teaching Roles

• MSc Data Analytics, MUBAS: teaching Artificial Intelligence, Forecasting and Data Analytics and Research Methods. I was the program developer.
• PhD and MSc in Informatics, University of Malawi, Lecturer teaching Machine Learning and Big Data.
• MSc AI, Machine Learning and Data Analytics, University of Mauritius.
• MSc in Bioinformatics, KuHES and Malawi University of Science and Technology: teaching algorithms and data science modules.

Selected PhD, MSc and BSc students under supervision

• Ruth Vellemu, PhD Topic (Predictive modelling for under 5 HIV Care Cascade)
• Emmanual Mkambankhani, PhD (Speech to text technology for the health domain)
• Emmanuel Ngalande, PhD Topic (Deep Learning techniques for assessing armyworm infestation using drone imagery)
• Jacob Mtitimila, MPhil Topic: (ML-driven personalisation of alarm thresholds for paediatric care)
• Horace Kwengwere, MSc (Water quality GIS advisory system)
• Khumbo Moyo, MSc (Expansion of urban green areas using ML)
• Mtende Kuyokwa BSc (Development of an Explainable AI model for AI assisted TB-detection from X-ray images)

Events and Grants

• 2022 – 2024 Principal Investigator for MUBAS, INSPIRE Network: Building a data science platform, UNS130629, a Welcome Trust funded project
• 2023 Winner (one of almost 50 winning projects) of a Global Challenges Grant for Catalysing Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• 2021-2022 Principal Investigator at MUBAS, Sub-grantee in a consortium led by APHRC, COVID-19 Global South AI and Data Innovation Grant, IDRC, Project ID, 109622
• 2020 Language Coordinator Chichewa, Lacuna & MasakhaNER, developing annotated datasets for African languages
• 2019 - 2020 AI4D Africa Innovation winner, Automatic classification of legal text in Malawi
• 2019 AI4D Language Dataset Fellowship

Consultancies

• Senior Expert in AI, Chilungamo II (Access to Justice) Programme (2026): Delivered specialised training for the Malawi Judiciary on AI
• Data Processing and Consulting Services for World Bank (2026 - present): Supports the implementation of a pilot Digital Low-Resource Language Library in Malawi

Publications

Datasets

Datasets I developed and/or coordinated:

• Spoken Chichewa Dataset This was used in a news classification competition on Zindi.Africa.
• Chichewa Parts of Speech (POS) and Named Entity (NE) Annotated dataset
• Public Health Questions and Answers Dataset used for a LLM competion on Zindi.Africa - a first such competition on the platform.
• Satellite image dataset for building damage cased by Cyclone Freddy in Malawi won a competition from AWS/IRCAI.
• Malawi Criminal Cases Annotated Dataset

Other Work

Conferences and Exhibitions

• Machine Learning Symposium in Malawi (IndabaX Malawi) 2019-2026
• History of Malawi: John Chilembwe Exhibition (SOM)
• Data Analytics 1.0 Competition

Historical booklets

• St. Michael and All Angels Blantyre Church commemorative booklet: 130 years

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