Olu Folarin

Research

Olu works on the lab's tooling layer — ab-trace, ab-pairs, the scheduler's operator-facing tooling — alongside Akoss Vidor. The tooling work is structurally cross-axis and has produced two cell-internal reports on the operational design of the lab's research infrastructure.

Like Akoss and Pranav, Olu came to research from production engineering. He has been with alphabell since 2020 and is based in Lagos, sharing the regional cluster with Ifeoma and Yvonne. He is one of the contributors who works most carefully on the lab's open-source release process.

Olu maintains a Yoruba-language tutorial series on systems programming that has approximately 1,800 subscribers.

Background

M.Sc. computer science, University of Lagos, 2013. Software engineer before research pivot, 2019.

Prior to alphabell: a Lagos-based payments company; Wayfarer Institute; Hyperion Cognitive Lab.

Selected publications

• Oct 2024 · ab-federated-comp
  A Federated Compute Scheduler for an Asynchronous Research Lab
  Pranav Iyer, Yusra Habibi, Akoss Vidor
• Oct 2025 · ab-durable-agents
  Durable Agent Substrate v1: persistent state, learned tool affordances, and verifiable execution traces
  Mira Holloway, Dineth Karunaratne, Priya Anand, Cheung Wai-Lin
• Sep 2024 · ab-interpretabili
  Interpretability Cell Pairing: how every dual-use capability run gets a watchful sibling
  Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove, Yuki Cho
• Apr 2025 · ab-agent-negotiat
  Negotiation Protocols Among Heterogeneous Agents: a benchmark and three baselines
  Roman Iliescu, Yvonne Akande, Lakshmi Ravi, Pascal Niedermeier
• Sep 2025 · ab-scalable-overs
  Scalable Oversight for Multi-Step Agent Systems: a Debate-Plus-Trace Approach
  Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard, Hiroshi Tanigawa, Maral Lotfi, Ruth Wernicke

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• How we built the lab's tooling, FOSDEM 2025
• Production lessons from ab-trace, SREcon Africa 2024