Youthful Exuberance at the Kenya Lab: A Conversation with Victor Akinwande and Julian Kuehnert

About Victor: Victor grew up amidst the hustle and bustle of Lagos, Nigeria. After contemplating a career in medicine he became interested in computer science, which led him to pursue a Masters degree at the CMU campus in Kigali, Rwanda and then to the IBM Kenya lab where he was first an intern and then a highly influential research engineer. He is now pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at CMU in Pittsburgh, PA in the USA. 
 
About Julian: Unlike Victor, Julian grew up in the calmness of a modest size German town, where he learned to repair bicycles and other crafts. He developed an interest in physics and then geophysics, with a special interest in the earth and its systems. He now works on the future of climate. Among the different problems he has worked on, one involves parameter estimation (also known as problem inversion, depending on who you talk to). Julian once thought of himself as not being good at languages, but as we hear, he has turned that weakness entirely on its head. 

Some recommendations from Victor:

Tyler Cowen's "Conversations with Tyler"  

Tomi Adeyemi's "Legacy of Orisha" book series 

Paul Graham's essays 

Some recommendations from Julian:

Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" 

Amandine Gay's documentary "Ouvrir la Voix" 

Patricia Kuhl, "The linguistic genius of Babies" (TED Talk)