I am a Ph.D. Candidate at Brown University, co-advised by Carsten Eickhoff in the Health AI and Ritambhara Singh in the Singh Lab. I am also a ACM SIGHPC Fellow.

My research lies at the intersection of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), with a focus on improving learning, factuality, and evidence-based modeling, particularly in healthcare. I am especially interested in evaluating the performance, robustness, and fairness of NLP and automatic speech recognition systems, and understanding their implications for healthcare accessibility in low- and middle-income settings.

I also collaborate with Dr. Hamish Fraser and the Bio-RAMP group on assessing the safety, robustness, and clinical applicability of generative AI in clinical decision-making, especially for low-resource healthcare environments.

Prior to my graduate studies at Brown, I obtained a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa (UCT). At UCT, I worked with Professor Geoff Nitschke on applying evolutionary algorithms to optimize machine learning for predictive analysis.

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You can contact me at tassallah_abdullahi@brown.edu

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Recent News

I will join Optum AI, UnitedHealth Group, as a Graduate Research Intern this Summer 2025

Selected Journal Articles

Retrieval Based Diagnostic Decision Support: A Mixed Methods Study
Abdullahi, T., Mercurio L., Singh, R., and Eickhoff, C.
JMIR Med Informatics. (2024)

Learning to Make Rare and Complex Diagnoses With Generative AI Assistance: Qualitative Study of Popular Large Language Models
Abdullahi, T., Singh, R., and Eickhoff, C.
JMIR Edu. (2024)

Predicting Diarrhoea Outbreaks with Climate Change
Abdullahi, T., Nitschke, G., and Sweijd, N.
PLoS ONE. (2022)

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Selected Conference Proceedings

K-Paths: Reasoning over Graph Paths for Drug Repurposing and Drug Interaction Prediction
Abdullahi, T., Gemou, I., Nayak, N., Murtaza G., et al.
KDD (2025)

AfriMed-QA: Towards A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset
Olatunji, T., Charles, N., Owodunni, A., Yuehgoh F., Abdullahi, T., et al.
ACL (2025)

Afrispeech-Dialog: A Benchmark Dataset for Spontaneous English Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond
Mardhiyyah Sanni, Abdullahi, T. et al.
NAACL (2025)

Diagnostic Accuracy of ChatGPT4.0 for TIA or Stroke Using Patient Symptoms and Demographic Data
Khatri, I., Zahiri, A., Abdullahi, T. et al.
International Stroke Conference, (2025)

Retrieval Augmented Zero-Shot Text Classification
Abdullahi, T., Singh, R., and Eickhoff, C.
ACM SIGIR ICTIR. (2024)

Predicting Disease Outbreaks with Climate Data
Abdullahi, T., and Nitschke, G.
In Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2021), Kraków, Poland

Disease Outbreaks: Tuning Predictive Machine Learning
Abdullahi, T., and Nitschke. G.
In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021), ACM, Lille, France

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Last Updated on 05/18/2025 by Tassallah Abdullahi