Ibrahim Denis Fofanah
Data Scientist & AI Researcher
Data scientist and AI researcher at Pace University. I coined Artificial Frictional Unemployment, and built the first machine learning model for crop yield prediction in Sierra Leone. Author of Understanding Agentic AI. I write about agentic systems and applied ML, with a bias toward what actually works, and who gets left out when it doesn't.
I Filed 49 Data Job Applications in Two Weeks. The Funnel Was the Hard Part.
49 filed applications, 27 distinct portals, 5 fast rejections. What my own September job ledger reveals about junior data hiring in fall 2026.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Oct 1, 2026·7 min
Delete 62% of your agent's context. It gets better, not worse.
Agent bills keep growing because trajectories keep growing. Three new papers show that cutting context by 40 to 63% lowers cost and, counterintuitively, raises accuracy. Here is the evidence, the caveats, and the five-minute fix you can ship today.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 30, 2026·7 min
pandas vs Polars vs DuckDB on 3.5 Million Taxi Rides. DuckDB Won Every Query, and the Timings Were the Least Interesting Part.
I ran pandas, Polars, and DuckDB through the same 3.5M-row NYC taxi CSV on a 7GB box. DuckDB won every query and used half the memory of pandas, but the most useful finding was a CSV parsing gotcha, not a timing.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 29, 2026·6 min
12,000 GPUs Are Landing in Africa. The Real Bottleneck Was Never Just the Hardware.
Strive Masiyiwa says Nvidia told him Africa had 80 GPUs. He asked for 12,000. The buildout now underway is real, but announcements are not access.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 28, 2026·7 min
Stop Eyeballing Your Agent's Answers. A 100-Line Eval Harness Catches the Regressions You Miss.
Every agent builder hand-tests a few prompts and calls it evaluation. This tutorial builds a 100-line Python harness with a fixed case set, runs it against two versions of a mock agent, and catches a regression that eyeballing would have missed.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 27, 2026·7 min
Agent Reflection Does Not Beat a Retry. The Numbers From 16,946 Trials.
A 16,946-trial study finds Reflexion, Dynamic Cheatsheet, and ACE each beat plain retry in some settings and lose in others, while a scheduler called VEX2 came closest to a clean sweep. What practitioners should do about it.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 26, 2026·7 min
Your Retry Worked. That Is How You Got Two Rows.
Retries fix transient failures, but they can also duplicate payments, records, and side effects. Here is how idempotency keys, unique constraints, and atomic writes make retries safe.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·8 min
The Data Scientist Role Is Splitting Into Three Jobs. Here's Which One to Become.
The classic data-scientist bundle is unbundling into the analyst, the ML engineer, and the AI engineer. BLS still projects 34% growth, but the generalist entry seat is the one shrinking. Here is how to pick your one.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·7 min
What Are Embeddings? How Meaning Becomes Math
An embedding turns meaning into a location so that similarity becomes distance. That one idea is the engine under semantic search, recommendations, and the retrieval half of every RAG system, and it is cheap enough to run on your own data.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·7 min
3.1 Agent Workdays per Human Day Is Not 3.1× Productivity
OpenAI reports 3.1 agent-workdays of runtime for every human workday in its research organization. The number shows a major workflow shift, but runtime, useful output, and scientific progress are not the same metric.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·7 min
OpenAI Uses 3.1 Agent-Workdays for Every Human Day. The Bottleneck Moved.
OpenAI reports 3.1 agent-workdays for every human research day. That does not mean 3.1× productivity, it means the scarce work has shifted toward judgment.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·13 min
Data Storytelling Teaches You to Present a Finding. Nobody Teaches You to Find One.
Every guide teaches you to present a finding. Almost none teach you to find one. The four questions that break a story open, and a real Sierra Leone trial where every write-up missed it.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·7 min
Want an author page like this?
We publish practitioners. Pitch an idea or republish a post from your own blog.