Asmelash Teka Hadgu is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Lesan AI and a Fellow at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). His work focuses on developing advanced machine learning technologies that support underrepresented languages and the communities who speak them. At Lesan, he has built state-of-the-art speech recognition systems for languages spoken in the Horn of Africa and the most advanced machine translation systems to and from Amharic, Tigrinya and English. Prior to Lesan, Asmelash did his PhD at the Leibniz University Hannover where his research focused on applied machine learning for applications in scholarly communication, crisis communication and natural language processing in low resource settings. Through both his research and entrepreneurial work, Asmelash is dedicated to advancing open, inclusive, and socially responsible AI to create more equitable access to knowledge and opportunity worldwide.