Associate Professor · Villanova University

Ebelechukwu
Nwafor

I research at the intersection of machine learning, IoT security, and health informatics — working to make computing systems safer, smarter, and more equitable.

Ebelechukwu Nwafor
About

Hello! I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Computing Sciences, Villanova University. My research interests span machine learning and natural language processing, information visualization, health informatics, data provenance, and IoT / cyber-physical systems security.

I graduated with my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Howard University under the supervision of Dr. Gedare Bloom, where my dissertation explored applications of data provenance to the Internet of Things.

Research Interests

Machine LearningNLPIoT SecurityHealth InformaticsData ProvenanceCyber-Physical SystemsInformation Visualization
Latest

News

Jan 2023

Received an internal grant for work on language translation for low-resource Nigerian languages.

Dec 2022

Presented our paper on intrusion detection in vehicular networks at IEEE ICMLA 2022.

Scholarship

Selected Publications

2025
Fostering Digital Inclusion for Low-Resource Nigerian Languages: A Case Study of Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin
Ebelechukwu Nwafor, Minh Phuc Nguyen
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025)
2025
Enhancing Graph Neural Networks: A Mutual Learning Approach
Paul Agbaje, Arkajyoti Mitra, Afia Anjum, Pranali Khose, Ebelechukwu Nwafor, Habeeb Olufowobi
arXiv preprint, 2025
2024
Evaluating Large Language Models for Enhanced Intrusion Detection in Internet of Things Networks
Ebelechukwu Nwafor, Ujjwal Baskota, Md. Salik Parwez, Jeremy Blackstone, Habeeb Olufowobi
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2024