Salomon KabongoPhD
AI Researcher · Engineer · Educator
Lead Software Engineer at State Farm's Innovation Group, PhD in Computer Science with a focus on NLP, Information Extraction and Knowledge Graphs from Leibniz Universität Hannover, former Board Member of the Masakhane Research Foundation. Building AI for Africa and the world.
PhD · Comp. Science
NLP · IE · Knowledge Graphs
1 Patent Issued + 3 Pending
AI/ML · State Farm
Best Paper Award
ICADL 2021
280+ Citations
Masakhane NLP
~$9M Research Funding
Masakhane (2021–2026)
Bridging AI Research & Real-World Impact
Dr. Salomon Kabongo is an AI researcher, engineer, and educator with a deep commitment to democratizing technology for Africa and the world. He holds a PhD in Computer Science (NLP/LLMs) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany.
As Lead Software Engineer at State Farm's Innovation Group, he leads R&D in computer vision, document intelligence, and generative AI — resulting in 1 issued AI/ML patent and 3+ additional filings. He previously served on the board of the Masakhane Research Foundation (2021–2026), where he drove a $9M+ initiative to build AI infrastructure for over one billion African language speakers.
A passionate educator, Dr. Kabongo shares his knowledge through YouTube channels in English, French, and Lingala — making AI accessible across languages and continents.
Research Interests
- Natural Language Processing & Large Language Models
- Automatic Speech Recognition & Translation (low-resource languages)
- Knowledge Graphs & Information Extraction
- Computer Vision & Multimodal AI
- African Language Technology
Talks & Presentations
- The Transformer: From RNN to Attention— Data Science for Social Impact, 2020
- Introduction to NLP— AIMS Cape Town
Learn With Me
Sharing AI knowledge across three languages. Subscribe to the channel that speaks your language.
@DrKabongo
English content on AI, NLP, research, and technology. Deep dives, tutorials, and career insights for the global AI community.
@DrKabongoFr
Contenu en français sur l'IA, les LLMs, la recherche et la carrière tech. Pour la francophonie africaine et mondiale.
@DarAkili
African educators teaching in African languages — Lingala and more. Technology, science, and knowledge in the languages of Africa.
Latest Posts
yield in Python
Understanding the yield keyword in Python — how generators work, when to use them, and their key advantages over regular functions.
Circular Queue: Python Implementation
A clean Python implementation of the circular queue (ring buffer) data structure that beats 94% of LeetCode submissions.
Mutually Exclusive vs. Collectively Exhaustive
A quick primer on two foundational concepts in probability theory that are often confused — mutual exclusivity and collective exhaustiveness.
Let's Connect
Open to research collaborations, speaking engagements, and technical partnerships.