Sascha Griffiths joins CMU-Africa

Carnegie Mellon University Africa is pleased to welcome Sascha Griffiths as assistant teaching professor. Griffiths joined CMU-Africa in September.

Griffiths received a magister artium from Bielefeld University, with English as a major and computational linguistics and mathematics as minors. The computer science and linguistics departments at Bielefeld were strongly linked together, so the same year he began his master’s thesis, Griffiths also started working with a local AI research group. Had the relationship between the departments not been so interwoven, Griffiths said that he might not have made the jump into computing.

After graduating, Griffiths pursued his Ph.D. at the Center for Computing and Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. He began exploring computational linguistics to provide support for African languages in natural language processing, but his experiences and first post-doctoral program took him to the field of robotics and human-robot interaction.

Spanning Technical University Munich, Queen Mary University London, and then Hamburg, Griffiths career has taken him all over the world. As he moved through these schools, he noticed a precise transition in people’s attention and efforts from machine learning to deep learning. As the interest shifted, there were fewer people to teach the logic, formal methods, and even cognitive science of classic artificial intelligence systems, and Griffiths skills became even more necessary.

At most of the universities he worked with, Griffiths was the one who instructed an introductory course to AI, and he was responsible for an intelligent systems master’s program. With students from Australia to North America, Russia to Sub-Saharan Africa, Griffiths taught an extremely diverse group of people.

For the past five years, Griffiths has been working in the industry as an AI consultant, co-founder, and CTO. Now, he’s ready to return to his roots—he aspires to help his students think about technical systems and interaction scenarios, to move toward culturally aware robotics. “I really missed academia and spent a year trying to find my way home,” he said. “CMU-Africa is it.”