Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian writer, linguist and lexicographer, founder of YorubaName.com and author of a few books in poetry and translation. He’s currently on the Technical Advisory Panel of Lacuna Fund, where he supports projects solving African language technology problems. He’s also the African co-editor of Best Translations Anthology, a new literary project focused on literary translations of the best work from around the world. He has worked at Google, Oxford Dictionaries, worked with Twitter, and was, in 2016, awarded a Premio Ostana “Special Prize” for indigenous language advocacy.
David Ifeoluwa Adelani is a PhD student in computer science at Saarland University, Germany. His current research focuses on natural language processing (NLP) for low-resourced languages, with a special focus on African languages. He is also actively involved in the research on the privacy of users’ information in dialogue systems and online social interactions. He has published about five papers at top Data mining/NLP/Speech conferences (WWW, EMNLP, LREC, Interspeech) and one computational linguistics journal (TACL).
Tolúlọpẹ́ Ògúnrẹ̀mí is a Computer Science PhD student at Stanford University. Before that, she completed a Master’s in Speech and Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh, where she worked on low-resource speech recognition in Yorùbá and Nigerian Accented English. She is also a Research Scientist at the Yorùbá Names Project.
Iroro Orife is a professional Electrical Engineer with 20 years of experience designing and developing audio technology for TV/Film/Music Studio applications at companies like Cirque Du Soleil, ESPN VideoGames (2KSports), Apple & Dolby Laboratories. His first-author papers on NLP for West African languages have been successfully presented at Speech and Machine Learning conferences like INTERSPEECH & ICLR. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering & Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon and a Masters in Music from Dartmouth College.
Aremu Adeola is a linguist, conversation AI designer and the inventor of the first African indigenous language crossword game - Yoobalingo. He recently bagged his B.A. in Linguistics and African Studies at the University of Lagos. He works at Translators Without Borders as a Terminologist.
