What courses are you teaching?
I teach Object-Oriented Programming (COMP1050), Seminar in Artificial Intelligence (COMP7800), AI for Gaming (COMP3800), Systems Administration (COMP3100), and Senior Project (COMP5500).
How have your interests, research, or experience led you to your field?
My decision to study computer science was spurred from a mentoring talk that I received as a middle school student. As a young professional, I did not allow myself to be discouraged by the lack of resources or the stereotypical challenges of being a woman, so I made up my mind to earn a Ph.D. in order to be competitive. I worked as a university faculty for 15 years and sought international intervention to overcome obstacles to my research goals. I was selected for the MacArthur Grant in 2009, and I used the opportunity to fine-tune my AI research at the University of British Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. I returned to Nigeria in 2011 to defend my thesis and continue my faculty career. I later joined Northeastern University as a postdoc and visiting fellow and transferred to Wentworth as Associate Professor in 2019.
What are you most proud of?
My research, academic, and outreach activities have given me the opportunity to work with colleagues and students from diverse backgrounds in inter and multidisciplinary fields of technology, art, design, engineering, science, health, and business on a global scale. I am most proud of being able to give back to society, which I benefitted as a product of mentoring. Thus, I am involved in promoting diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and implementing strategies to motivate more girls and women into computer science (www.computergeeky.org). This has equipped me with outstanding skills to understand the needs of underrepresented minorities, especially women in Africa to be part of the rapidly growing field of computer science.
What is one interesting fact about you?
Apart from being a faculty member, mentor, and researcher, I am a great cook, fashion designer, and preacher.
Name one exciting thing that is happening in your classroom.
I am teaching the Seminar in AI class and planning to attend the virtual Microsoft AI & Gaming Research Summit with all my students on February 23rd and 24th. We will be having a discussion about the conference in our next class. This is the first time I am attending an AI conference together with my students and it is a very exciting time for the class!
Share your favorite quote for Black History Month.
"Birds sing not because they have answers but because they have songs" - African proverb
List of recent publications and other accomplishments (2019 - 2021):
- Collaborative filtering model optimized with multi-item attribute information space for enhanced recommendation accuracy, International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications. (2020)
- An affective learning-based system for diagnosis and personalized management of diabetes mellitus, Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems. (2020).
- 2020 EPIC mini-grant Award (2020).
- ASEE best poster award for the design of an educational game for civil engineering education (in collaboration with my colleague and students) (2020).