Aleka Melese Ayalew

I am a PhD Researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland, working on artificial intelligence and its applications in healthcare. Before starting my doctoral research, I served as a lecturer at the University of Gondar for more than six years, where I was involved in university teaching, research, and academic activities across areas of computing and artificial intelligence.

My current research focuses on developing trustworthy, explainable, and knowledge-grounded AI systems for healthcare and clinical decision support. My doctoral research centers on large language models for clinical discharge summarization, with particular emphasis on parameter-efficient fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge grounding, hallucination reduction, content-leakage prevention, factuality evaluation, evidence attribution, and explainability.

My work includes an explainable structured clinical discharge summarization approach combining hybrid fine-tuning and RAG, and research on structure-only retrieval for preventing content leakage in medical RAG. I am also extending this research toward explainable multimodal clinical discharge summarization, integrating clinical text and chest X-ray imaging using vision-language models.

My broader academic background and research experience span machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, medical image analysis, natural language processing, and data science. This background supports my current research at the intersection of LLMs, clinical NLP, multimodal AI, and trustworthy healthcare AI.

My research goal is to develop reliable, transparent, and evidence-grounded AI technologies that can assist healthcare professionals, improve clinical information processing, and contribute to safer AI-supported decision-making.

Portfolio website: https://aleka-ayalew.github.io/