AKAD Education Group - Africa

Mark Eric Fairweather is a Kenyan AI engineer who built some of the earliest state of the art AI systems in Silicon Valley just as the LLM boom took off. He is an African optimist with a deep business background grounded in a decade of experience with finance and marketing credentials. He specializes in applied AI, having studied deep learning and machine learning before the LLM breakout in 2022.

AKAD Education Group - Africa nurtured Fairweather, where he has risen to be a Peer Mentor, speaking at seven seminars between 2017 and 2019. He has trained diverse audiences on Communication Skills, Personal Branding, Academic Success and Admissions to Global Universities. 

Fairweather graduated from Lenana School in 2017 with 423 marks (A-, KCPE); was the Head of School, and an alumnus of Greenyard Junior School. He is an AKAD peer mentor who brings visionary / revolutionary leadership and small project management to the table. An epitome of the saying “stay hungry and foolish” by Steve Jobs, and helps others acquire the same principal in life. He is very comfortable with public presentations and is flexible with sharing expertise with others and helping people achieve positive goals.

As a Computer Science graduate of Minerva University in San Francisco, Minerva Schools at KGI, the most selective university in the world. He has built models, products and businesses, bringing together technical depth and experience in business, operations and developing teams.

As a founding engineer at a HF0 multimedia generative AI startup serving millions of users, he built some of the first multimedia AI generation and editing pipelines. As CTO and architect of OutdoorBuilders.com, he trained and deployed ensembles of more than 200 AI models to produce the current state of the art photorealistic outdoor construction renders embedded within an agentic sales pipeline. He also developed on-premises AI systems for the legal industry, including agentic tools, records and document archives. He fine-tuned a language model on more than 50 million algorithmically generated synthetic entries derived from proprietary data and built enterprise retrieval systems for secure AI use cases. He has also worked on CCPA and GDPR data regulation at one of the big 4 consulting companies.

His life’s work is encapsulated in Jodongo Labs, which is on a mission to incubate 150,000 African scale-ups in core infrastructure sectors. He believes Africa must develop solutions rooted in its own identity and cultural context for those solutions to be sustainable and scalable. This belief also drives his work documenting and distributing content on identity and self-leadership through #iamfromchallenge and AKAD Education Africa.

Mark is currently exploring gaps in manufacturing and information asymmetry to develop efficient solutions for businesses and enable cross-border value addition. He sees this work as part of the same mission: building African enterprises grounded in their context, with the technical capability and business foundations to scale.

He was an entrepreneurial freshman as he joined Minerva Schools at KGI, the most selective university in the world. He was founder of Iviah Energy, Cynosure, Diverting The Winds Campaign, and Festival Of The Arts. He was an ELP Scholar, accredited to his stellar performance in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (2017) where he was among the top 1% of candidates in the nation. His scholarliness landed him his first internship as a corporate cashier in Equity Bank, Ngong branch, Nairobi and part of the student-led civic partnership with Alemany Farm, where he programmed its interactive map.

Fairweather’s flagship enterprise, Iviah Energy, is a machine designing and biofuel manufacturing company based in Ngong town, in operation since October 2018. As the company founder, he developed his own uniquely efficient agricultural machines in collaboration with Oloika Engineering that can manufacture innovative custom briquettes at the capacity of 300Kgs per hour. Cynosure company developed a financial B2C system called “Sense Cents,” and whose educational website he built for his high school, released in Spring 2020. It is grounded on cutting edge science of learning research and behavioral design principles.

At Minerva, Fairweather pursued Formal Analysis, Empirical Analysis, Complex systems, Multimodal Communication and Intercultural competency in his freshman year, then proceed to study Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence in his Sophomore year. He conducted primary research on the effect of the plastic bag ban in San Francisco; secondary research on the science of learning, the interaction between tuberculosis and insulin, climate change, rising sea levels, and Facebook’s emergent communities. In these pursuits, he employed data science skills that encompass multiple regression, machine learning, and statistical inference.

Fairweather won 2 hackathons with his Minerva teammates, namely CalHacks and TreeHacks, and came in second in the NASA Hackathon 2019. He then expanded his knowledge of Python, Django, and Tensorflow to create the solutions for Summer, 2020 and engaged with the Climate Action and Out of One’s Bubble clubs in Minerva. 

During his high school years, Fairweather has worked with PCEA Mugumoini to mentor young adults through its Sunday School program from 2014 to 2018. He was also the lead mentor in Oloolaiser High School from 2018 to August 2019.  He took active part in a myriad of activities, but most importantly: Board member of a new secondary school banking company set to take root in secondary schools nationwide. He was co-author of a mathematics revision manual, a member of the school’s student leadership elected as the School Captain previously holding the Environment and sanitation office, council secretary form 2 post and deputy class prefect in form 1.  (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenana_School).

He was founder of the Diverting the Winds Campaign which took root in Ng’ando area as well as its branch being adopted as a school ministry, instigating his mentees to start the African Footprint initiative and Hold a Hand campaign. He was the deputy chairman of Science club, coordinator of Greenlight club as well and treasurer of Sunday school ministry. He is a peer counselor at his school, as well as being a Sunday school teacher where he taught youth at PCEA Mugumoini. He played rugby in his school's first team and also for Ngong RFC. He was a member of the Red Cross society and is a trained First Aider. He mentors at his previous school, Wings to fly scholars at CSB forums as well as current and former school mates.