Research and Innovation Frontier in Artificial Intelligence
Minimal, research-driven AI work — useful systems, clear interfaces, practical innovation.
Rifai is built around a simple principle: build things that are actually useful.
We work across the full stack — from foundational research to production-ready systems — with a focus on language, reasoning, and human-centered AI interfaces.
Selected publications from the Rifai team:
| Paper | Venue | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Harnessing Transfer Learning from Swahili: Advancing Solutions for Comorian Dialects | Deep Learning Indaba | 2024 |
| Preserving Comorian Linguistic Heritage: Bidirectional Transliteration Between the Latin Alphabet and the Kamar-Eddine System | LaTeCH-CLfL @ ACL 2025 | 2025 |
| Datasets Creation and Empirical Evaluations of Cross-Lingual Learning on Extremely Low-Resource Languages: A Focus on Comorian Dialects | LAW-XVIII @ EACL 2024 | 2024 |
Full list on Google Scholar
We focus on three areas:
Applied Research — Prototypes and experiments at the intersection of research and engineering: models, datasets, and evaluation workflows.
Language & Reasoning — Exploration around large language models, structured reasoning, and robust evaluation.
Human-Centered AI — Product-oriented systems designed to be usable, interpretable, and well-scoped.
This organization hosts:
Swauti — Our text-to-speech system. Try it at swauti.rifailabs.com.
For collaborations or early-stage work: naira@rifailabs.com