Franz Josef Och (November 2, 1971) is a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

computer scientist. He is best known for being the chief architect of

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API ...

. He has worked as a Director at

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

. Prior to this, he was Head of Data Science at ''Grail'', (an Illumina company), Chief Data Scientist at

Human Longevity Inc. Human Longevity, Inc. is a San Diego-based venture launched by Craig Venter and Peter Diamandis in 2013. Its goal is to build the world's most comprehensive database on human genotypes and phenotypes, and then subject it to machine learning so tha ...

, and earlier worked for

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

as a Distinguished Research Scientist and head of machine translation based at

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...

, headquarters south of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

Life and work

He studied computer science at the

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

(FAU), Germany, where he graduated with a ''Dipl.Ing.'' degree in 1998. In 2002, he received his PhD in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from RWTH Aachen University, Germany.Franz. J. Och: Statistical Machine Translation: From Single-Word Models to Alignment Templates. Diss. RWTH Aachen 2002. The same year he moved to the United States. From 2002 to 2004 he worked as a Research Scientist at the

Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techn ...

at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

(USC). His research activities are in statistical machine translation, natural language processing and machine learning where he has co-authored more than 50 scientific papers. He has written several open-source software packages related to statistical natural language processing and was the chief architect of the world-known

. In addition to German, he speaks English and some Italian.

References

External links

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Google and Facebook roll out Farsi language tools
''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', June 19, 2009
Franz Josef Och, Google's translation uber-scientist, talks about Google Translate
David Sarno, ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

'', March 11, 2010
Can Google break the computer language barrier?
Tim Adams, ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...

'', December 19, 2010 {{DEFAULTSORT:Och, Franz Josef 1971 births Living people People from Forchheim (district) Google employees German computer scientists RWTH Aachen University alumni University of Erlangen-Nuremberg alumni Natural language processing researchers