Sunday O. Ojo is a Professor of Computer Science, holding BSc Honours and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Universities of Ibadan and Glasgow, respectively. His academic career spans over 40 years, engaging in teaching, research & innovation, postgraduate students supervision in the field of Computing, at a number of African Universities. These include the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, University of Botswana in Botswana, and in South Africa, University of Zululand, Tshwane University of Technology, and Durban University of Technology. During his career period so far, he held academic positions as Lecturer, Senior lecturer, Research & Innovation Professor, Head of Department and Faculty Executive Dean. He also served as Visiting Professor, at a number of universities, within and outside Africa.
He currently holds a position as an Adjunct Professor (Research and Postgraduate Supervision) at Durban University of Technology, and an (Academic) Expert Consultant to University of South Arica. Also, he is the Executive Director of the Inclusive African Indigenous Language Technology (AfrILT) Institute, a Non-Profit Organization, in South Africa. He shares the vision of a world where all Africans can communicate and access information through the internet, in their own indigenous languages, so that none of these languages should become extinct. He also provides research and consulting services to Language Services Providers on Low Resource Morphologically Rich AfrILs in Machine Translation, Translation Quality Evaluation, Ethno-Linguistics Profiling, and Capacity building services. He was among the worldwide selected invitees to the Unesco Language Technology for All (LT4All) conference, held at the Unesco Headquarters in Paris, France, December 2019.
He has promoted several honours, master’s and doctoral students’ dissertations and theses, tens of which he successfully graduated. He is also well published with extensive experience in sustained research and publications in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings, as well as books and chapters in books. He is very experienced in academic institutional strategic partnership engagement. For several years, he led the ICT for Development research niche area at Tshwane University of Technology, which bags the Best Research Group of the year in 2019. In DUT, he is presently the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Project Lead for Carbon Literacy for Youth Employability and Job Creation (CL4YEJC) in SSA research and innovation project, involving researchers from the UK and SSA institutions, under the British Council Innovation for African Universities (IAU) programme. The CL4YEJC project seeks to provide an integrated solution to Climate Change and Youth Employment challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa by leveraging Carbon Literacy for Green Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
His national and international professional services experience include serving as a consultant and resource person for several national and international bodies on ICT related projects. These include, the Botswana National Innovation Capability Database System, USAID Botswana Confederation of Commerce, Industry and Manpower Economic Research database system, Botswana National ICT Policy development, Commonwealth Network for Information Technology (COMNET-IT) ICT capacity building project for Commonwealth countries. Others are the Euro-Africa-ICT Reference panel work on producing a manifesto for strategic EU-Africa partnership on ICT Research, European Commission Scenarios for Research and Technology Development Cooperation with Europe project, and African Union Development Agency (AUDA)-NEPAD panel of Experts on Artificial Intelligence for African Development. During 2020, he was a consultant to an international European company, on African Language Technology and Services. He also served as external examiner, academic programme review and accreditation panel member, to various universities. He is a committed Christian married with children.