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Emmanuel Alabi
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About

I am a software engineer working toward research in artificial intelligence and robotics. My interest is in systems that have to operate in the physical world: agents that perceive an environment, build some representation of it, reason about what to do, and then act in settings where being wrong has consequences that a benchmark score does not capture.

I came to this from building software rather than from a research group, and I am explicit about what that means. Engineering gave me the ability to build and operate non-trivial systems, which is most of what an experimental pipeline turns out to be. It did not give me the mathematical and methodological preparation that research requires, so I am building that deliberately and in public through implementations I wrote, experiments I ran, and notes on the parts I got wrong.

This site is the record of that. It is intentionally sparse rather than padded: everything on it should lead to code, an experiment, or a document you can check.

Research interests

These are the areas I am currently exploring. They are interests rather than claims of expertise, and I expect them to narrow as the work gives me a reason to narrow them.

Embodied AI
How intelligent agents can perceive, reason about, and interact with physical environments.
Robot Learning
Learning policies and representations for perception, navigation, manipulation, and control.
Computer Vision
Visual perception and representation for autonomous systems.
Autonomous Systems
Systems capable of sensing, planning, decision-making, and action.
Multimodal Intelligence
Combining vision, language, sensor observations, and action.

Adjacent territory I read in but am not yet focused on: machine learning, robotics, state estimation, planning, reinforcement learning.

Current focus

My current work is the foundational phase of a research programme beginning in August 2026: mathematics for intelligent systems, state estimation and rigid-body geometry, machine learning implemented from first principles, and reproductions of published baselines in perception and navigation. The intent is to reach the point where I can formulate a research question precisely enough to answer it with controlled experiments.

The first completed piece of that is a reproduction and evaluation study of an eye-state and temporal-alerting pipeline, run under a subject-independent protocol.

For what I am working on this month specifically, see what I’m doing now. For the programme itself, including how I intend to work and what will be published, see Research.

Engineering background

Before focusing more deeply on AI and robotics research, I worked across full-stack systems, AI infrastructure, distributed systems, developer tooling, and production software. That background is the reason I approach research as a systems problem as much as a modelling one.

  • Obelo — AI Systems & Multimodal Content Infrastructure (Founder & CEO): Designed and developed a production AI platform combining multimodal generation, retrieval-augmented context, asynchronous orchestration, model routing, and evaluation systems.
  • Punch Group — Production Web Systems (Software Engineer): Delivered three production products: GraphQL query optimisation and memory-leak resolution on a Next.js/Express application, a Nuxt.js lead-generation tool with HubSpot and Salesforce integrations, and a real-time support service with in-app video.
  • SPay Business — Mobile & Financial Systems Engineering (Software Engineer): Worked on production mobile-financial systems, including authentication improvements, application performance, interface redesign, CI/CD automation, and over-the-air mobile deployments.
  • Acadu — Educational Platform (Founder): Led product, architecture and engineering: React Native mobile, Next.js web, NestJS backend, PostgreSQL, deployed on Fly.io and GCP with Redis and RabbitMQ for caching, message queuing and real-time event processing.
  • Royal Gate Group — Technology & Digital Strategy (Head of Technology and Digital Strategy (part-time)): Led technology and digital strategy for eight years: group-wide digital infrastructure and corporate email standardisation, IT and network systems maintenance, and ongoing digital transformation programmes including e-commerce platforms and internal systems across subsidiaries.
  • Union Bank of Nigeria — Enterprise Systems & Security (Software Engineer): Built and maintained enterprise applications in React and Java, designed and enforced website security protocols, and delivered merchant notification systems over REST APIs.

The detailed history is on the CV.

Education

  • Babcock University · 2019–2023
    BSc (Hons) Software Engineering
    Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria
    Relevant coursework: Algorithms and Data Structures; Discrete Mathematics; Introductory Statistics; Introduction to Operations Research; Artificial Intelligence and Applications; Introduction to Big Data Engineering; Computer Organization and Assembly Language; Operating System I; Database System Design, Implementation and Management.

Contact

I am interested in research collaborations involving embodied AI, robot perception, autonomous systems, and multimodal learning. Contact details are on the contact page.