Ibrahim Denis Fofanah
Data Scientist & AI Researcher
Data scientist and AI researcher at Pace University. I coined Artificial Frictional Unemployment, and built the first machine learning model for crop yield prediction in Sierra Leone. Author of Understanding Agentic AI. I write about agentic systems and applied ML — with a bias toward what actually works, and who gets left out when it doesn't.
Before You Clean Your Data, Ask This One Question: Is It Actually Dirty?
A lender's income field was 23% empty, and the gap turned out to be the best feature in the dataset. Three mechanisms behind missing data, four diagnostics that tell them apart, and why cleaning is a provenance problem in disguise.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 28, 2026·12 min
AI Won't Replace Data Scientists. It Will Replace Lazy Ones.
AI writes the Python, the SQL and the first draft of the dashboard. It cannot attend your meetings, choose your metric, or be accountable for the decision. A working division of labour, and a churn model that failed for none of the reasons you would expect.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 23, 2026·11 min
The First Question Every Data Scientist Asks: What Does One Row Represent?
A falling average order value triggered a discount review. The arithmetic was right and the table was wrong. Why the grain of a table decides whether every metric built on top of it is true.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 23, 2026·12 min
Agent Accuracy Went Up. Agent Reliability Barely Moved.
Twelve metrics, four dimensions, 14 agentic models. The finding: reliability gains lag well behind capability gains. Why a single success rate hides the flaws that actually break deployments.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 23, 2026·6 min
Sierra Leone Is Writing Its First AI Strategy. The Minister Asked a Better Question Than Most Rich Countries Do.
MoCTI and the World Bank are building Sierra Leone's first National AI Strategy on a Compute, Capacity, Context diagnostic. The framing is genuinely good. The binding constraint is that 7 million Sierra Leoneans are offline.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 21, 2026·7 min
Why AI Keeps Rejecting Your Resume, and Why It Is Probably Not Your Resume
Career advice says fix your resume. A peer-reviewed audit of embedding-based resume rankers suggests the rejection is a property of the retrieval system. What is real, what is cargo cult, and what to do.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 18, 2026·7 min
AI in Africa in 2026: The Real State of Play
A practitioner's map of AI in Africa in 2026: where the money flows, who is building, and why compute and data sovereignty decide the rest.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 18, 2026·6 min
93% of AI Adoption Isn't Happening in AI Jobs
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 18, 2026·10 min
Data Storytelling Teaches You to Present a Finding. Nobody Teaches You to Find One.
Every guide teaches you to present a finding. None teach you to find one. The four questions that do the work, including the one that broke open Google's Sierra Leone trial.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 17, 2026·7 min
Google's AI Tutor Raised Maths Scores in Sierra Leone. It Raised Them Most for Students Who Were Already Ahead.
Google ran a real randomised trial of an AI tutor in Port Loko: 1,763 students, a proper control group, independently marked. Maths scores rose. But buried in Google's own report is a finding nobody is quoting, it helped the strongest students most.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 13, 2026·12 min
I Built the First ML Model for Sierra Leone's Rice Harvest, and It Failed
No model beat naive persistence on crop statistics alone. Free satellite data cut forecast error by a third, and May–June rainfall predicts the harvest months ahead.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 13, 2026·7 min
Brain Waves to Words: What Brain2Qwerty Actually Does, and What It Doesn't
Meta's Brain2Qwerty decodes typed sentences from brain activity with no surgery, at 61% word accuracy. The catch: the scanner is a room, and the participants could type.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 13, 2026·6 min