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I am a final-year mechatronics engineering student studying in Nigeria. Earlier this year, two friends and I wrote a paper during Apart Research's Global South hackathon, and it was accepted as a poster at the Global South AI affinity event at NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney. I am the first author. My registration is already paid. Getting to Australia is the hard part. Flights, poster printing, meals, and accommodation come to about $3000, which I can't cover as a student.
The paper is "Evaluating Mental Health LLM responses to Localized African English," with co-authors Namirah Rasul and Ewura Ama Sam. We wanted to understand how a mental health model responds when someone describes what they’re going through in their own local dialect, the way people in Lagos, Accra, or Dhaka actually talk, and whether the quality of support holds up. We took MentaLLaMA-chat-7B and 100 clinician-grounded scenarios from MentalChat16K, then rewrote each one in Nigerian Pidgin and Ghanaian English without changing the meaning. That gave us 300 prompts to compare.
OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=ICZEGRAVCn
Apart: https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/evaluating-mental-health-llm-responses-to-localized-african-english-pzag
The paper is done already, so this is only about getting me to NeurIPS. In Sydney, I want to present the poster and get feedback from people working on robustness and red-teaming, since walking someone through the failure cases is very different from them skimming a PDF. I also want to talk to eval researchers about LLM-as-a-judge. Ours missed every failure, and I’d like to know whether that’s our rubric or a wider problem, because a lot of safety claims lean on these judges.
I get to Sydney and present the poster. Beyond that, I want to come back with a few people willing to give feedback on the benchmark, ideally including someone who works on evals at a lab or institute, and have the Inspect version public on GitHub with frontier model results within about three months.
My registration is already paid. The $3,000 covers the rest:
Return flights, Nigeria to Sydney: $2,200
5 nights' lodging: $600
Poster printing: $100
Meals and local transport: $100
I am the first author, working with Namirah Rasul and Ewura Ama Sam. I’ve spent about two years on LLM evaluations and building AI safety capacity in Nigeria. I built SandbagBench-Lite, a black-box harness for measuring strategic underperformance in LLMs. At HeyLina AI, I interned as a researcher on conversational eval rubrics and LLM-as-a-judge setups.
I also wrote “Forecasting AGI: A Granular, CHC-Based Approach,” and my work on behavioral adaptation (“Punctuation Paranoia”) was recognized in the ENAIS AI Safety Action Competition.
I was a 2024 Non-Trivial Fellow, a Cooperative AI Research Fellowship finalist, and went through the TReND-CaMinA ML and Computational Neuroscience program in Kenya. Outside of research, I co-founded AI Safety Hub Nigeria (I’m the technical lead), run EA ABU, and lead policy for PauseAI Nigeria.
Here is my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdulfatah-habeeb/
The main risk is that I don't raise enough money to pay for the flight or travel in time for the conference and eventually miss it
Zero dollars ($0) has been raised so far