Open to opportunities

Pierrette Umutoniwase

@pierretteumutoniwase

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Energy and software engineer focused on ML, sustainability, and impactful AI solutions.

Rwanda

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What I'm looking for

I seek roles building scalable, trustworthy AI for sustainability and the public sector, emphasizing careful data work, collaboration, and impact.

I am a recent graduate in Energy Engineering and Software Engineering (Machine Learning track) with a strong commitment to sustainability, data, and AI that improves people's lives. I combine hands-on dataset preparation, careful annotation, and model-building to deliver reliable ML solutions.

My capstone and project work includes hate-speech detection for a low-resource language, customer-support chatbot fine-tuning with Hugging Face transformers, IMDB sentiment analysis comparing logistic regression and LSTM, and reinforcement learning simulations with DQN and PPO agents.

I have practical experience in preprocessing, tokenization, embeddings, error analysis, and deployment using Python, Flask/Django, and Git, and I contributed to sustainable energy research during an internship. I value patience, precision, collaboration, and multidisciplinary teamwork.

I am excited to apply my skills to scalable AI solutions in the public sector and sustainability-focused projects where careful data work and model reliability matter.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Capstone ML Researcher

African Leadership University

Apr 2025 - Jul 2025 (3 months)

Built a hate-speech text classification model for a low-resource language, personally performing preprocessing, labeling, and dataset balancing to enable reliable training and evaluation.

Data Labeling Tokenization Embeddings Transformers Python Hugging Face Model Evaluation

Machine Learning Intern

ACE-ESD

Sep 2024 - Nov 2024 (2 months)

Supported research and technical reporting on sustainable energy projects and contributed to data handling and collaboration across multidisciplinary teams during a field internship.

Data Annotation Data Cleaning Technical Reporting Collaboration Python SQL Git Research

Reinforcement Learning Developer

African Leadership University

Created a custom OpenAI Gym environment for healthcare logistics and developed DQN and PPO agents with hyperparameter optimization and visualization of agent navigation.

Reinforcement Learning Open AI Gym PPO Hyperparameter Tuning Python Simulation

NLP Project Developer

African Leadership University

Fine-tuned a Transformer for a customer support chatbot, handled dialogue annotation and evaluation with NLP metrics, and deployed a simple interface to demonstrate real-world handling of edge cases.

Deployment Flask Hugging Face Python Git

NLP Researcher

African Leadership University

Conducted IMDB sentiment analysis comparing logistic regression and LSTM approaches, executed preprocessing and achieved balanced accuracy across 50,000 reviews.

Sentiment Analysis)Logistic Regression Tokenization Embeddings Python Model Comparison

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of Rwanda, College of Science and Technology

Bachelor of Science, Energy Engineering

Activities and societies: Work and projects focused on sustainable energy research and technical reporting; extracurricular involvement with SheUnitesAfrica.

Pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Energy Engineering with coursework in thermodynamics, renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, and sustainable design.

African Leadership University

Bachelor of Science, Software Engineering (Machine Learning/AI)

Activities and societies: Projects in hate-speech detection, customer support chatbot, IMDB sentiment analysis, and reinforcement learning simulations; involvement in data annotation and model deployment.

Pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering with a Machine Learning/AI specialization, covering courses in machine learning, deep learning, NLP, and reinforcement learning.