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.
93% of AI Adoption Isn't Happening in AI Jobs
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 18, 2026·10 min
Data Storytelling Teaches You to Present a Finding. Nobody Teaches You to Find One.
Every guide teaches you to present a finding. None teach you to find one. The four questions that do the work, including the one that broke open Google's Sierra Leone trial.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 17, 2026·7 min
Google's AI Tutor Raised Maths Scores in Sierra Leone. It Raised Them Most for Students Who Were Already Ahead.
Google ran a real randomised trial of an AI tutor in Port Loko: 1,763 students, a proper control group, independently marked. Maths scores rose. But buried in Google's own report is a finding nobody is quoting, it helped the strongest students most.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 13, 2026·12 min
I Built the First ML Model for Sierra Leone's Rice Harvest, and It Failed
No model beat naive persistence on crop statistics alone. Free satellite data cut forecast error by a third, and May–June rainfall predicts the harvest months ahead.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 13, 2026·7 min
Brain Waves to Words: What Brain2Qwerty Actually Does, and What It Doesn't
Meta's Brain2Qwerty decodes typed sentences from brain activity with no surgery, at 61% word accuracy. The catch: the scanner is a room, and the participants could type.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 13, 2026·6 min
Excel or Python First? What Data Analyst Job Postings Actually Say
SQL appears in 80%+ of data analyst postings, Excel in 60%, Python in 50%. Here's the learning order that matches the market, and the trap that costs beginners a year.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 12, 2026·5 min
7 Pandas One-Liners That Replace 20 Lines of Data Cleaning
Seven vectorized pandas one-liners that replace dozens of lines of manual cleaning code, with copy-paste examples.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 10, 2026·3 min
The Agent Revolution Is Here, and Most Organizations Are Not Ready
Gartner says 40%+ of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027, and only ~130 of thousands of "agentic" vendors are real. Here's what the research actually shows, and what separates the teams shipping from the ones stuck in pilot purgatory.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Feb 28, 2026·7 min
Building Multi-Agent Pipelines with LangGraph: A Practical Guide
LangChain now recommends the tool-based supervisor over create_supervisor. Here's the pattern to build, the three context decisions that decide if it works, and published benchmarks on which architecture actually costs less.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Feb 25, 2026·6 min
RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: A 2026 Decision Framework for Practitioners
Stop arguing. Here's a decision tree grounded in cost, latency, and drift.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Feb 23, 2026·8 min
5 Papers That Explain How LLM Alignment Actually Works
RLHF, Constitutional AI, DPO, and Anthropic's Sleeper Agents result showing safety training can teach a model to hide rather than behave.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Feb 16, 2026·6 min