About

Biography

When I was a kid, I got a LEGO set every year for my birthday. It was the highlight of my life. I would sit by my window and play with it, because I liked looking outside and making up stories about the people walking by. I loved LEGO, but after a while I was tired of the three sets I had. So I mixed all the spare parts together and started making my own characters, sets and stories. That's the first thing I remember making, and it describes me as a person pretty well. I'm somebody who will use everything I have to the fullest to have fun and create cool experiences.

When I was about eight, my aunt from America called my mum and asked what my dreams were. To be honest I had no answer, but then she asked, "Why don't you become an engineer?" I had never heard that before, but it sounded like a dream: be creative, build something. It really felt like my calling. I was hooked straight away, and I have never looked back since.

Then, during COVID, my dad bought a PC. I was supposed to be paying attention in Zoom lessons, but I was on Roblox in another tab. That's where I found friends I played with almost every day for four years, even though my mum caught me more than once not listening to the lesson. In seventh grade we could choose an extra subject, so I picked IT, because I already knew my way around PCs and had become known as the IT kid. I started learning to program with CS50, and the first thing I built was a full working copy of Google's Dino game in Scratch. I calculated the velocity and the gravity myself, and I was in seventh grade.

Over the years I lost my love for programming and got interested in hardware, which came from a slow computer that annoyed me while I was coding. My PC was too slow for the code I wanted to write, so I started learning how PCs work, how to build them and what each part does. Then my friends wanted new PCs because they had just got into gaming and wanted to level up. So I configured their PCs, found the best deals and built them. After three or four builds I felt sure enough to build my own PC, and that's the one I use now. I had saved 400 euros over my whole life, and I convinced my dad to let me build a full PC from scratch with used parts. That PC was worth about 700 euros at the time, and I got it for 450. I'd say quite a steal, isn't it?

Project work with UDE

What do I do outside of school? I work regularly with people at the Chair of Electronic Components and Circuits (EBS) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. One of the projects I did there was my MobileNet V1 and V2 work, which covered INT8 quantization and getting models ready for an FPGA. MobileNet project page

Now you might be asking how a 17-year-old got a position at the UDE. I had asked Prof. Seidl, who works at the UDE and Fraunhofer IMS, for an internship at Fraunhofer IMS. It didn't work out for various reasons, but he liked my initiative and offered me a place at the UDE instead. To be honest I knew nothing about microfluidics, but I took it anyway, because the chance was too valuable. So from 3 to 28 August 2026, during the holidays, I spent four weeks at the chair working on a control and image-analysis system for droplet-based microfluidics. That work became FluidicStudio, which is the most hands-on project I've done so far.

Community and internships

I got into machine learning very early, after I joined Hack Club and saw their AI channel. I loved the idea of making things that adapt to the people using them, and not the other way around. I can code, but I never enjoyed coding on its own. I wanted something that mixed code with hardware, and that's how I ended up in computer engineering and GPUs.

The only time I wanted to quit was before Hack Club, when I had lost my love for coding and could see AI coming.

I still don't know how I found Hack Club, but I'm very thankful I did, because it's a big part of who I am today. Nobody around me was connected to it. Seeing so many people build things and be part of a community lit the fire again, the one I had been missing.

My first real project was an ESP32 alarm clock. I shipped it through Stasis, a Hack Club program where you build hardware and get money for the components, and that's where I got the money for the parts. While I was soldering, I found mistakes on the board, so I couldn't finish it. I've since fixed the schematic and the board, but I haven't rebuilt it yet.

I build all the time now. I used to play League of Legends and go out with friends, but these days my life is building and learning, because I want to become one of the greats and achieve something big. Outside school I'm looking for internships, mostly in computer vision, ML systems, GPU computing and hardware.

Fun facts

I'm Ghanaian, Italian and German. Both of my parents are from Ghana, and they moved to Italy separately. They met there and got married. I lived in Italy for four years, and then we moved to Germany, where I've lived ever since.

German, English and Twi are my mother tongues, and I know the basics of Spanish.

I have a little skill in every area, but I'm a master of none.

What I keep exploring

Computer engineering and low-level systems
GPU computing and graphics APIs
Machine-learning systems and computer vision
MobileNet and INT8 quantization
FPGA-oriented and embedded hardware
Developer tools and experiments
Games, Minecraft and pixel art

MIRA in public

The MIRA models have passed 6,500+ lifetime downloads on Hugging Face. That's a download counter, so it counts fetches, not people. Still, it means the files are being used beyond my own machine. When the counter jumped on the first day after the release, I couldn't really take it in. For a project that started as a question, that's a strange and good thing to see.