Sharafdin Yusuf
AI research for the Somali language at Goobo Labs.
Sharafdin Yusuf is self-taught. He started young and never took to the formal academic path, so mathematics and physics came from his own reading rather than a classroom. The same habit carried him into programming and open source.
He began coding at age 12, became a tech mentor by 16, created Soplang at 17, and built a custom Debian-based operating system by 18. The open-source work kept going from there, across systems, developer tools, blockchain, security, and infrastructure.
Today his work is AI research for the Somali language at Goobo Labs, an open research lab building the foundations of Somali AI: programming in Somali (Soplang), localized systems (nabadOS), language standards (Somali Language Standard), and NLP datasets (SomNLP-Corpus).
Core contributions
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Open source
Somali language infrastructure
- Soplang: A Somali programming language.
- nabadOS: A developer-first, Somali-localized Linux distribution.
- Somali Language Standard: An open, machine-readable standard for Somali orthography, grammar, terminology, and AI resources.
- SomNLP-Corpus: An open Somali text corpus for NLP and LLM research.
- hanticoin-go: Blockchain core for Hanticoin, a Proof-of-Stake Layer-1 for payments in Somalia.
- Memvid: A memory layer for AI agents.
- YoAuditor: An LLM-powered code auditor built in Rust.
- Writing: He writes plain-language articles, including on Milicsi.
- Science: Mathematics and physics are still what he cares about most, and he keeps studying them alongside chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and gemology. In August 2021 he reached an independent astrophysics milestone through his own observation and study.
- Mentorship: At Goobo Labs he teaches the Python, data science, machine learning, and NLP bootcamps for Somali developers.
He wants modern AI for every language. Somali gets there through open datasets, open standards, and open education.