Oyinkansola Onwuchekwa

Oyinkansola Onwuchekwa (KKC) is a PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the University of Hull, where she builds multilingual NLP systems for low-resource African languages. Her core research centres on the H-RAC framework, a Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Classifier that decodes emotion in Afrobeats lyrics across Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin, and English, trained on a dataset of over 6,000 songs across 12 emotion categories. A committed advocate for responsible and ethical AI, she works to challenge the systemic marginalisation of speakers of low-resource languages and to ensure that AI systems are designed to serve humanity in its full cultural and linguistic diversity, beyond the fraction of the world already well-represented in training data. She has co-designed AI literacy and data governance toolkits with cultural heritage practitioners under a British Academy-funded ODA Grants project and serves as a reviewer for NERC and ICLR. A practising musician and songwriter performing as KKC, she brings both technical expertise and lived cultural knowledge to the question of who AI is built for, and who it currently leaves behind.