Mila > Équipe > Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

Research Intern, Ph.D, McGill University

My name is Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, I am a Computer Science Ph.D. student at McGill University, in the NLP group specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Healthcare. I am advised by Professor Jackie Cheung. I hold a Bachelor of Science with honors in Mathematics, from Kazan Federal University, Russia, and a Master of Science with honors in Computer Science and Data Engineering from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Recently I was a Machine Learning Consultant and Research Scientist at Phagos Biotech where I worked on building large-scale language models for genomic sequencing, and bacteriophages.

My interests are in Natural Language Processing (Machine Translation, Large Language Modeling, Speech Recognition, Information Retrieval) for low-resourced languages and Machine Learning for Healthcare (Drug Discovery, small molecule generations, gene therapy). I am the creator of many Afro-centric NLP systems like the FFRTranslateAfroLM and Okwugbe ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition for low-resourced languages) Python library (just to name but a few). You can find my CV here.

Before my PhD, I was a research intern at the Mila Quebec AI Institute, working on Drug Discovery projects using Deep Learning (and GFlowNets), at Mila Quebec AI Institute under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio and Dianbo Lui. More specifically, I worked on leveraging GFlowNets for Biological Sequence Design but also to learn the posterior distribution over binary multimodal dropout masks (GFlowOut). Previously, I was also an NLP Data Scientist at Roche Canada and a Research Scientist at ModelisLabs, working on Health and pharma-related challenges. Alternatively, I am working on NLP language technologies, with a focus on low-resourced Sub-Saharan languages at Masakhane Research Foundation (and previously at Google Research).