Cape Coast, Ghana → The World
Ama Baduwa
Baidoo
AI Engineer·Autonomous Robotics·Building Systems That Work.
“I build autonomous systems that operate under constraints: cheap hardware, edge compute, limited power.”
About
From Cape Coast to autonomous systems
I grew up in Cape Coast, Ghana, and fell in love with the idea that software could touch the physical world. At Academic City University I graduated with a 3.93 GPA and First Class Honours as the Best Computational Sciences Graduate of 2026 but the real education happened in the lab and on the water.
A remote research internship at NDSU's SMART Lab sharpened my computer vision craft. Then I spent a year building an autonomous surface vessel that collects aquatic debris perception, navigation, and supervision running on an NVIDIA Jetson, for under $500 in hardware. It became two first-author IEEE papers.
“I build autonomous systems that operate under constraints: cheap hardware, edge compute, limited power.”
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USV Detection Rate
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IEEE Papers (First Author)
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GPA · First Class Honours
Research & Projects
The crown jewel: an autonomous USV
HYDROBOT · Academic City University · 2025–2026
Autonomous USV for Aquatic Debris Collection
A low-cost unmanned surface vessel that finds and collects floating debris on its own. ROS 2 handles perception, navigation, and supervision on an NVIDIA Jetson; YOLOv8m, trained on 10,154 images with a 16:1 class imbalance, reaches mAP@50 of 0.839, optimized with TensorRT FP16 to 10–15 FPS on edge hardware. Validated over 10 field trials.
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Detection rate
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Collection success
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Return-to-home
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Hardware cost
Publications
A. Baduwa Baidoo, G. Oletu, B. Nomo, “Real-Time Aquatic Debris Detection and Autonomous Navigation for a Low-Cost USV Using YOLOv8 and ROS 2,” IEEE ICAST 2026 (under review).
A. Baduwa Baidoo, G. Oletu, B. Nomo, “Design of a Low-Cost Autonomous USV for Aquatic Debris Collection,” IEEE ISNCC 2026 (under review).
Selected projects
MLOps Sentiment Analysis Pipeline
Python · MLflow · Scikit-learn · FastAPI · Docker
Reproducible ML pipeline with experiment tracking across 50+ runs, 85.9% accuracy, and a containerized prediction service.
RAG System for Ghana Election Results
TypeScript · FAISS · BM25 · Node.js
Hybrid retrieval built from scratch — no LangChain — combining dense FAISS search with BM25 across 30+ years of electoral data.
Potato Disease Classifier
TensorFlow · FastAPI · React
Full-stack AI web app classifying potato plant diseases from leaf images with 95%+ accuracy.
Autonomous USV
ROS 2 · YOLOv8 · Jetson · TensorRT
Full autonomy stack for a low-cost unmanned surface vessel — perception, navigation, and mission supervision on the edge.
Experience
Where I've built
AI Software Developer
Nov 2025 — Mar 2026AI Labs · Accra, Ghana (Remote)
- FastAPI backends for African-language AI products (KasaAI, Studyflow) serving thousands of users
- Dockerized ML inference services; cut API response time by 30%
- Voice automation (ASR, TTS, LLMs) for 3+ African languages
Computer Vision Research Intern
Jul — Aug 2025SMART Lab, North Dakota State University · USA (Remote)
- Automated YOLOv8 annotation pipelines, improving data prep efficiency by 40%
- Targeted Albumentations augmentation for severe class imbalance, +15% recall
- Fine-tuned detection models to mAP 0.85; benchmarks informed production model selection
NLP Research Intern
Jul — Aug 2025WAKKEH · Abidjan, Ivory Coast (Remote)
- POS-tagging error-analysis pipeline with Flair NLP + sequence alignment at 98% accuracy
- Full-stack dashboard and REST API serving 1,000+ data points to linguists
Agentic AI Engineer Intern
2025NeuralSeek
- Built agentic AI workflows and LLM-powered automation for enterprise use cases
Artificial Intelligence Intern
May — Jul 2024AIDEC Digital · Accra, Ghana
- Interactive Power BI dashboards tracking KPIs for data-driven decisions
- Content analysis and curation for Tech News Global
Skills
The toolkit
Languages
AI / ML
Robotics & Edge
Web & Deployment
Data & Tools
Leadership & Awards
Recognition along the way
Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge
First Runner-Up & Most Creative Policy Brief · Oct 2024
Best Computational Sciences Graduate
Academic City University · Class of 2026 · First Class Honours
Valedictorian
Overall Best Graduating Student · Morgan International Community School · 2022
Student Tutor & Mentor
Tutoring and mentoring peers in computer science and mathematics
Contact
Let's build something
Open to AI/ML engineering roles, research collaborations, and interesting problems in robotics and computer vision. The fastest way to reach me is email or ask the chat assistant anything about my work.
Open to AI/ML Engineering Roles & Research Collaborations