John Thuo Mwangi

John Thuo Mwangi is a computer scientist from Kenya, currently pursuing an MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar at the University of Oxford and a member of University College. John is passionate about designing AI systems that are culturally grounded, ethically responsible and aligned with the needs of low-resource communities.

He holds a First Class Honours degree in Computer Science from the African Leadership University (ALU), where he specialised in Machine Learning and Data Engineering. His experience spans research, industry and open-source communities. He served as a Software Engineering Fellow at Meta through Major League Hacking (MLH), contributing to multilingual machine translation efforts. He is also an active contributor to projects like Scribe-Data, an open-source tool for extracting and formatting language data from Wikidata and Wikipedia. Through his work, John envisions a future where African languages and contexts are fully integrated into global AI development.

John’s research interests lie at the intersection of Machine Learning, AI Governance and Responsible Innovation. He is particularly interested in optimising large-scale AI systems through privacy-preserving and risk-aware approaches, with a focus on contextual alignment. At Oxford, he aims to advance this work by exploring governance frameworks and audit methodologies that ensure AI technologies reflect and respect local values.

Outside of academia, John enjoys writing poetry, watching football, and listening to Reggae—particularly “Girlie Girlie.” He shares technical insights through Medium articles on topics such as differential privacy, model tracking and record linkage. He also firmly believes in the power of a good night’s sleep, almost as much as the rigour of a well-tuned machine learning model.