I am a 5th-year 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 focuses on developing reliable and trustworthy Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. I focus on core challenges, such as improving factuality, robustness, and safety, with a deep interest in ensuring these qualities hold in high-stakes, low-resource, and multilingual environments.

Current Research Areas:

• Clinical Decision Support: In collaboration with Dr. Hamish Fraser and Bio-RAMP Labs, I assess the safety and clinical applicability of generative AI in low-resource settings.
• Global Accessibility: Through the Masakhane NLP community, I work on evaluating automatic speech recognition and Multimodal systems to improve healthcare accessibility in low- and middle-income countries.

Prior to Brown, I obtained a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, where I worked with Professor Geoff Nitschke on evolutionary algorithms for predictive modeling.

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You can contact me at tassallah_abdullahi@brown.edu

CV, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Twitter

Recent News

• Two Papers accepted to NeurIPS
• Our Paper AfrimedQA won the Best Social Impact Award at ACL 2025, Vienna.
• I presented my work on leveraging knowledge graphs for explainable and evidence-based AI-driven drug discovery at KDD 2025, Toronto.
• I will join Optum AI, UnitedHealth Group, as a Graduate Research Intern this Summer 2025.

Selected Conference Proceedings

Position: Benchmarking is Broken-Don’t Let AI Be Its Own Judge
Cheng, Z., Wohnig S., Gupta, R., Alam, S., Abdullahi, T., et al.
NeurIPS (2025)

LLM-Powered Graph Reasoning for Knowledge Discovery
Gemou, I., Abdullahi, T., Singh, R.
WIML NeurIPS (2025)

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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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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Last Updated on 09/29/2025 by Tassallah Abdullahi