Could you share more about your work, background and your research area and interest?

I’m from Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi; fondly known as the warm heart of Africa. I’m a PhD researcher at Aalto University in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, where I focus on co-designing explainable machine learning for social good in low-resource contexts. I studied computer science at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College and later earned an MSc in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence from Bournemouth University as a recipient of the prestigious Chevening Scholarship.

My professional life has been a canvas for exploration, with a steady focus on building solutions that improve quality of life and service delivery across the global south.

From consulting for the World Bank and USAID to co-founding a tech startup, Apalis in 2018, I’ve consistently sought out daunting challenges and tried to build moonshot innovations to meet them. My interests sit at the intersection of AI for good, AI literacy and usability, and embedding explainability into the AI-powered solutions that make smart cities work.

How does your research connect to smart cities?

Today, buildings, roads, cars, and countless other things are continuously generating and consuming data. Artificial intelligence has surged forward on the back of all this data, but as more and more AI solutions are deployed to improve services and lives, the effort to make those solutions explainable deserves just as much emphasis.

In a smart city, AI advice should be easy to understand: clear, traceable, and transparent enough that people actually trust it and act on it. This is the gap my research sets out to close.

What do you hope to gain from the experience of working at the FinEst Centre?

Coming from a technical background, I’m excited to collaborate with people from different fields and to extend my work on AI usability beyond models into the world of policy.

Working in a dynamic, interdisciplinary team like the one here at the FinEst Centre will sharpen my expertise in AI and data policy. And I hope my involvement with TalTech in Estonia will open opportunities for collaboration between Estonia, the EU, and Malawi across AI, technology policy, and smart cities.