Draft:Ernest Mwebaze
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Ernest Mwebaze is a Ugandan artificial intelligence researcher and computer scientist. He is the Executive Director of Sunbird AI, a non-profit organisation in Uganda developing practical AI systems for social good, and a board member of Data Science Africa. He co-founded the Makerere University Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (AIR), one of Africa's leading centres for applied AI research, and has held research positions at Google AI and the United Nations Global Pulse Lab. His research focuses on applying machine learning to challenges faced by smallholder farmers and healthcare systems in Africa, and he has been a prominent advocate for developing AI tools that reflect local African contexts and languages. In October 2025, he co-led the release of Sunflower, Uganda's first open-source multilingual large language model, supporting over 31 local languages.
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UgandaUniversity of Groningen (PhD)
Ernest Mwebaze | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | Uganda |
| Alma mater | Makerere University (BSc, MSc) University of Groningen (PhD) |
| Employer | Sunbird AI |
| Known for | AI for social good in Africa; Makerere AI Lab; Sunflower LLM |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial intelligence, Machine learning |
| Institutions | Sunbird AI |
| Doctoral advisor | Prof. Michael Biehl Dr. John A. Quinn |
Education
Mwebaze completed seven years of primary school in Kampala and six years of secondary education at St Mary's College, Kisubi, a Catholic boarding school in Uganda. Emerging among Uganda's top 2,000 students, he was awarded a government-sponsored, tuition-free place at Makerere University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and subsequently a Master of Science in Computer Science. He then travelled to the Netherlands, where he earned a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Groningen, supervised by Prof. Michael Biehl and Dr. John A. Quinn. His doctoral research investigated divergence-based methods for prototype classification algorithms and causal structure discovery, with applications to contextual datasets in Africa.[1][2]
Career
Makerere University
Following his doctorate, Mwebaze joined the Makerere University College of Computing and Information Sciences as a lecturer in computer science and machine learning, a role he held for over ten years.[3] During this period he co-founded and led the Makerere University Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (AIR), originally named the Data Science and AI Lab, which became a prominent centre for practical AI research in Uganda and the wider African context. The lab was designed to apply computational techniques to problems specific to the developing world, spanning agriculture, healthcare, and environmental monitoring.[4][5] He also participated in the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) Empower the Teachers programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015, and undertook a visiting research fellowship at UCSF in 2014, where he collaborated on mathematical modelling of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.[6]
United Nations and Google AI
Mwebaze worked as a Data Science Consultant with the United Nations Global Pulse Lab in Kampala, focusing on applying AI to developmental challenges aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. He subsequently joined Google AI as a Research Scientist, based at the Google AI research lab in Accra, Ghana, where he continued work on applied and fundamental AI research.[7][8]
Sunbird AI
Mwebaze serves as Executive Director and co-founder of Sunbird AI, a Ugandan non-profit organisation registered in 2019 and grown out of the Makerere AI Lab. The organisation, which also holds 501(c)(3) Equivalence Determination status, is committed to open-source research and focuses on developing practical AI systems for social good. Its projects span African language technologies, including machine translation, speech synthesis, and automatic speech recognition for low-resource Ugandan languages, as well as AI tools to support evidence-based decision making and policy formulation, and environmental monitoring such as noise pollution detection across Kampala.[9][10]
A flagship output of this work is Sunflower, a pair of open-source multilingual large language models (14B and 32B parameters) fine-tuned from Qwen 3, released in October 2025. Designed to support comprehension and generation across more than 31 Ugandan languages, the models were launched at the AI for African Languages Conference 2025 in Kampala by Dr. Aminah Zawedde, Permanent Secretary of Uganda's Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, and were reported to outperform existing global AI systems, including those from Google and OpenAI, in 24 out of 31 Ugandan languages. Mwebaze co-authored the accompanying technical paper alongside Engineer Bainomugisha and John Quinn.[11][12]
Sunbird AI has also signed memoranda of understanding with Uganda's Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, and with Centenary Technology Services (Cente-Tech), aiming to deploy AI-for-social-good solutions across the Centenary group's network of over 20 million Ugandans.[13]
Research
Mwebaze's research has focused on applying machine learning to challenges faced by smallholder farmers and healthcare systems in Africa. At the Makerere AI Lab he led work on automated diagnosis of cassava crop diseases, including Cassava Mosaic Disease and Cassava Brown Streak Disease, using smartphone image recognition, supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under the BMGF Program for Emerging Agricultural Research Leaders (PEARL).[14][15] The lab also developed AI tools for malaria diagnosis from thick blood smear images and crowdsourcing platforms for nationwide cassava disease surveillance in Uganda, the latter published at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing.[16] He has also applied stochastic transmission models to the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases including Trachoma, Ebola, and Leprosy. He has published 32 academic papers with more than 400 citations.[17]