Ndapa is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research is on Natural Language Processing (NLP). Her current falls under the following themes: NLP for healthcare; NLP for low resource languages with the goal of widening the population of people that can benefit from language technology;
Given the opaque nature of the most powerful machine learning models, such as large language models, Ndapa’s work also touches on model explainability.
nnakashole[at] ucsd.edu
Office: CSE 4108
At UCSD, she is a member of the Artificial Intelligence group, and the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Before UCSD, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Machine Learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked with Tom Mitchell. She obtained her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Saarland University, where her advisor was Gerhard Weikum. Her dissertation was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society. Her work been awarded an NSF CAREER award.
She is the founder of Okalai, an educational and outreach project that introduces Artificial Intelligence to young people in Namibia, and other African countries.
She graduated with a Bsc and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, her thesis advisor was Hussein Suleman. Even further back, she completed her early education in Namibia.
