Open to opportunities

Chrys Shem

@chrysshem

AI sociolinguist and evaluation specialist building culturally grounded frameworks for African language AI safety and quality.

Kenya

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for remote, consultancy, or research roles in AI sociolinguistics, cultural safety, red teaming, and evaluation methodology—especially for African Language AI and RLHF—where culturally grounded frameworks drive measurable quality and safer outcomes.

I’m a sociolinguist and AI evaluation specialist with hands-on applied expertise in how language functions across African communities—how it builds trust, signals identity, encodes harm, and fails audiences when designers lack context. For the past three years, I’ve translated that expertise into AI evaluation pipelines, including designing five-dimension cultural alignment scoring frameworks and authoring annotation methodology for Swahili and Sheng edge cases.

I don’t just evaluate AI outputs; I design what evaluation means and identify failure modes standard benchmarks miss. I conduct RLHF preference-ranking evaluations with written rationales recognised for exceptional depth of linguistic and cultural reasoning, and I run cultural red teaming via adversarial scenarios that expose Swahili pragmatics, Sheng code-switching, high-context meaning erasure, and harmful implicature invisible to English-language safety classifiers.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

AI Sociolinguist & Evaluation Specialist

Current

Rotalia Communications Ltd

Jan 2023 - Present (3 years 4 months)

Authored a five-dimension AI language evaluation framework (clarity, tone, cultural relevance, factual accuracy, instruction adherence) used to assess multilingual African outputs. Led cultural red teaming and RLHF preference-ranking evaluations, identifying Swahili/Sheng pragmatic failures and converting sociolinguistic bias insights into measurable content-safety benchmarks for engineering teams

AI Evaluation Cultural Alignment AI Red Teaming Cross Lingual Meaning Distortion

Regional Director, Communication Eval

Population Reference Bureau (PRB)

Jan 2019 - Jan 2023 (4 years)

Designed and operationalised MEL systems to track communication effectiveness across language groups and delivery channels using rubric-based, multi-criteria assessment. Led QA of policy communications across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, introducing tiered editorial reviews that reduced factual and tonal error rates by over 30% within 18 months.

Monitoring Policy Communications Mixed Methods Research Discourse Analysis

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of Nairobi

Master of Medical Sociology, Medical Sociology

Master of Medical Sociology with a thesis on social determinants of health communication and community knowledge systems in peri-urban Kenya, grounding expertise in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Egerton University

Bachelor of Arts, Sociology & Linguistics

Bachelor of Arts in Sociology & Linguistics, combining social behavior, power, and identity structures with language structure, pragmatics, and cross-cultural communication.