TEDx From Archaeology to Technology | A. Rotolo, CEO and Co-Founder @ Ludwig | TEDx Caohejing 2019

This is an inspiring story of how pursuing the dream of becoming an academic career in Archaeology, Antonio Rotolo eventually ended up funding Ludwig (https://ludwig.guru/), a Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence company. Antonio started Ludwig in 2014 on the aftermath of his post-doc at MIT, where he matured the idea that he could apply what he learned as an archeologist to new problems. In 2014, Antonio and his two co-founders (Fedeirco Papa, PhD and Roberta Pellegrino, PhD) were naively dreaming about building a software that would help billions of people (the three of them included) write better and with more confidence in English. A few years later, in 2019, Ludwig has already helped 20 million unique users write better in English and achieve more in their career.

Ludwig, the name of the company, comes after Wittgenstein, the father of Philosophy of Language who inspired them with the quote “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. They created Ludwig to tear down those linguistic limits. They want to free the students and researchers of the world from their linguistic limits so that they can focus on the two things that really matter to them: learning and producing high-quality research.

During a business trip to China, Antonio was invited to talk about his inspiring journey @ TEDx Caohejing.