Salomon KabongoPhD
AI Researcher · Engineer · Educator
Lead Software Engineer at State Farm's Innovation Group, PhD in NLP from Leibniz Universität Hannover, former Board Member of the Masakhane Research Foundation. Building AI for Africa and the world.
PhD · NLP
Leibniz U. Hannover
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.