Nduka Nwagbo, AI Engineer . Open models, made useful.

I turn open-weight models and open-source tools into AI that works in any industry: running where your data lives, grounded in your own documents, and tested before anyone relies on it.

Based in Birmingham, UK · Open to AI engineering roles

Pipeline replay 1 of 8

US accident impact risk · Transport Score a new accident report for major traffic impact.

  1. Audit leakage check
  2. Split by time
  3. Model LightGBM
  4. Explain TreeSHAP
Result from the project's results

A calibrated risk with its reasons, computed in the browser.

  • 0.852 ROC-AUC on later, unseen months
  • 0.184 average precision against a 2.78% base rate
  • 0.0026 calibration error

Replays of real project pipelines. Figures come from each project's own results.

Results in numbers

Selected work, with evidence.

Each project shows the problem, how it was built and tested, and the measured result, with links to the live system and the code.

An accident-risk model rebuilt after finding its label was leaking.

US accident impact risk Transport Explainable ML

Found that the popular “accident severity” label mostly tracked which traffic feed filed the report, then rebuilt an honest model on 3.2 million accidents from one consistent feed, explained it, and made it run entirely in the browser.

  • Python
  • LightGBM
  • SHAP
  • Optuna
  • TypeScript
0.852 ROC-AUC on later, unseen months, with no server
The US Accident Impact Risk dashboard: the finding that the old severity label tracked the reporting feed, an average-precision chart, and a panel scoring a real accident.

Complaint triage that sends the uncertain cases to a person.

Consumer complaint triage Financial services NLP and retrieval

Classifies US consumer financial complaints into ten products with distilled transformers, finds the relevant CFPB examination procedures, and decides whether each case is handled automatically or sent to a person.

  • PyTorch
  • RoBERTa
  • ModernBERT
  • BM25
  • Gradio
Macro-F1 0.757 on 274,065 held-out complaints, up from 0.689
The Complaint Triage app classifying a credit-report complaint with 96.5% confidence and showing it would be handled automatically, next to the example complaints, two of which go to a person.

An evidence assistant that checks every quote before it answers.

PetroKnowledge Energy Local LLMs and RAG

Answers questions about public NNPC information with local open-weight models. Every claim carries a quote that code checks word for word in its source, figures are checked again by a second model, and unsupported questions get a clear refusal.

  • Python
  • llama.cpp
  • Gemma
  • Postgres
  • pgvector
Runs on local open-weight models; every quote is checked against its source
Collected and read once
  1. Collect : Obeys robots.txt; files that bar crawlers come by hand
  2. Read pages : As a browser lays them out, headings kept
  3. Read documents : PDF layout and tables, spreadsheets, scanned pages
  4. Gate : Each reader passes an accuracy test before indexing
  5. Index : Postgres vector and keyword search, plus a small graph

A hard-hat and vest detector tested on real site photos, not just its test set.

PPE compliance detection Construction safety Computer vision

Merged three public datasets into 10,864 images, trained YOLO11 and served it as an app that flags missing hard hats and vests. An independent real-world benchmark exposed a model that missed real vests; two fixes raised real-world vest recall from 0% to 50.5%.

  • YOLO11
  • Albumentations
  • ONNX Runtime
  • Gradio
  • React
Real-world vest recall raised from 0% to 50.5% at 80% precision
The PPE Compliance Detector app: an upload area for a site photo or clip, a detection-sensitivity slider and a results panel.

Four local models and a human approval at every step, on one 8 GB GPU.

Agentic menu development Hospitality Agentic AI and local LLMs

My MSc dissertation. A five-stage agentic workflow turns a hospitality client's intake form into a consultant-grade menu brief. Each stage reads only what the approved stage before it hands over. Open-weight models draft, another model family reviews, code checks what they miss, and a consultant approves each step.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Pydantic
  • llama.cpp
  • Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
Judged usable with minor edits by a practising consultant
The app's Stage 2 page for a fictional demo client: the approved strategy, a note that 8 of its 27 claims rest on live market research, a Word evidence register, and review notes beside the text.

Open-data evidence for a winning plan to reconnect a city district.

SpineLens AI Urban planning Geospatial analytics and optimisation

The evidence toolkit behind The Innovation Spine, a team proposal to reconnect Birmingham's Knowledge Quarter to the city centre. Route legibility scoring, wayfinder placement, traffic and collision evidence and a costed plan, shipped as an interactive map.

  • Python
  • OSMnx
  • GeoPandas
  • NetworkX
  • React
The route ranking held in 86% of 4,000 random weightings
SpineLens AI: a dark map of central Birmingham with the walking route to the Knowledge Quarter, wayfinder points, and a panel showing 35,141 vehicles a day and 20 injury collisions nearby.

Hackathon-winning retrieval with small open models.

ApexMind Knowledge retrieval RAG with small open models

A four-hour build for the BCU AI Hackathon 2026. Answer 100 multiple-choice questions using only open models of 8 billion parameters or fewer, grounded in Wikipedia, with confidence scores and repeatable runs.

  • llama.cpp
  • Qwen3-8B
  • Qwen3-Embedding
  • bge-reranker
  • Python
100% on a hand-checked 20-question set, up from 90% without retrieval
Runs for each question, on one 8 GB GPU
  1. Query : Entity-focused search terms from the question
  2. Retrieve : Wikipedia first, then the web; cached for repeat runs
  3. Assemble : The top passages within a length budget, reranked
  4. Answer : Qwen3-8B at temperature 0, with and without evidence
  5. Score : Confidence from parsing, evidence, support and agreement
  6. Verify : Low-confidence answers checked by hand against sources

Quantum and classical classifiers compared on identical data, with nothing overclaimed.

QHybrid Lab Cybersecurity Quantum machine learning

A web service that runs a quantum-kernel classifier against classical models on the same rows, features and tuning folds, for a cybersecurity and a medical dataset, and serves a calibrated network-intrusion triage model. Every comparison can be re-run from the public code.

  • Python
  • Qiskit
  • scikit-learn
  • LightGBM
  • FastAPI
With a tuned bandwidth the quantum kernel tracked the RBF SVM, at or below the best classical model in 31 of 40 runs
QHybrid Lab after an 8-qubit run on network flows: the quantum-kernel SVM and the RBF SVM both reach 0.850 balanced accuracy, with the bandwidth tuning table and kernel diagnostics below.

Built to be checked before it's trusted.

I build AI that professionals can check before they trust it, and I take it through the whole lifecycle: data, modelling, validation, explanation, deployment and handover. I test models against real-world data, not only a test set, and I write down what each system cannot do.

Before AI, I studied communication and multimedia design and worked in IT support, explaining fixes to people who are not technical. I still write for the people who will use the system.

Experience and education

  1. 2025 – present Recruitment Ambassador Birmingham City University
  2. 2025 – 2026 MSc Artificial Intelligence Birmingham City University
  3. 2024 – 2025 IT Support Technician Bani Law Consulting, Abuja
  4. 2016 – 2020 BSc (Hons) Communication and Multimedia Design American University of Nigeria

Recognition

  • 2026 UKREiiF Next-Gen Challenge, West Midlands winners With my team
  • 2026 BCU AI Hackathon, winners With my team
  • 2026 PGXPO, Silver award For my research poster

Certifications

  • CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) and Network+ (N10-009), valid to 2027
  • Certificate in Cybersecurity, University of Windsor, 2025
  • Linux Foundation LFS151 Cloud Infrastructure, LFS158 Kubernetes and LFS250 Kubernetes and Cloud Native Essentials, 2025

Let's make AI useful for you.

Based in Birmingham, UK. Email is the quickest way to reach me.

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