Seyi Olojo

Seyi is a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley School of Information where she is advised by Dr. Jenna Burrell and Dr. Niloufar Salehi. She is broadly interested in the epistemic cultures of the natural language processing and her work intervenes within the fields of science and technology studies, Black studies and critical data studies. She asks, what are the politics of operationalizing language given its legacy as a technology of colonialism.

Seyi’s dissertation research uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to understand how African indigenous knowledges are situated as counter-dominant approaches to normative technical practices in the field of natural language processing, especially in contexts where researchers seek to improve the inclusion of low-resourced African languages within machine translation technologies.

Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, the US Fulbright Program, and the Weizenbaum-Institute for Networked Society.

Publications

Seyi Olojo, Matthew Bui. Data Fabulation: Counter Fictions and Truth Telling within Data Production. De Gruyter Handbook on Critical Data Studies, 2025. (forthcoming)

Seyi Olojo, Janina Zakrzewski, Andrew Smart, Erin van Liemt, Milagros Miceli, Amber Ebinama, Lameck Mbangula Amugongo. Lost in Machine Translation: The Sociocultural Implications of Language Technologies in Nigeria. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, June 2025.

Yuya Shibuya, Seyi Olojo, Andrea Hamm, Radhika Krishnan,Teresa Cerratto Pargman. Can Civic Data be Counterdata and Open Data? Exploring the Limits of Data, Contestation and Governance. Nomos, May 2025.

Andrew Smart, Ben Hutchinson, Lameck Mbangula Amugongo, Suzanne Dikker, Alex Zito, Amber Ebinama, Zara Wudiri, Ding Wang, Erin van Liemt, João Sedoc, Seyi Olojo, Stanley Uwakwe, Edem Wornyo, Sonja Schmer-Galunder, Jamila Smith-Loud. Socially Responsible Data for Large Multilingual Language Models. ACM conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, September 2024.

Seyi Olojo. ”Counterdata”. Data & Society Keywords on the Datafied State Anthology, April 2024.

Liza Gak, Seyi Olojo, Niloufar Salehi. The Distressing Ads That Persist: Uncovering the Harms of Hyperpersonalized Diet and Weightloss Ads Among Users Recovering from Eating Disorders. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, November 2022.

Claudia Von Vacano, Renee Starowicz, Evan Muzzall, Michael Ruiz, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Seyi Olojo, Arlyn Y Moreno Luna, David J Harding. Towards a Conceptual Framework for Developing and Analyzing Inclusive STEM Programs in Higher Education. Frontiers in Psychology, May 2022.