Sharon O’Brien

Sharon O’Brien is Professor of Translation Studies in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland, where she teaches translation technology, localisation, and research methods, among other topics. Currently, she is coordinator of an interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral Horizon 2020-funded project on translation in emergency and disaster settings – INTERACT, The International Network in Crisis Translation (2017-2020). She has been a funded investigator in the Science Foundation Ireland national research centre, ADAPT, for over 10 years. Sharon has supervised twelve PhD students to date and has mentored several post-doctoral fellows.

Marco Turchi

Marco Turchi is the head of the machine translation unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK). He received his PhD. degree in Computer Science from the U. of Siena, Italy in 2006. Before joining FBK in 2012, he worked at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Italy, at the University of Bristol, at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, and at Yahoo Research Lab. His research activities focus on various aspects of sequence-to-sequence modelling applied to machine translation, speech translation and automatic post-editing. He is co-authored more than 140 scientific publications and served as a reviewer for international journals, conferences, and workshops. He is the co-organizer of the Conference of Machine Translation, the on Spoken Language Translation and of the automatic post-editing evaluation campaigns. He has been involved in several EU projects such as SMART, Matecat, ModernMT and QT21. He is the recipient of the Amazon AWS ML Research Awards on the topic of end-to-end spoken language translation in rich data conditions.

Mikel Forcada

Prof. Mikel L. Forcada is full professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the Universitat d’Alacant and he has also been president of the European Association for Machine Translation since 2015. From the turn of the millennium, Prof. Forcada’s research interests have mainly focused on the field of translation technologies, but he has worked in fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, biotechnology, surface physics, machine learning (especially with neural networks) and automata theory. He is the author of more than 70 articles in international journals, papers in international conferences and book chapters, of which about 40 are about translation technologies. In 2004, after heading several publicly- and privately-funded projects on machine translation he started the free/open-source machine translation platform Apertium (with more than 40 language pairs) and the free/open-source software project Bitextor (which crawls Internet sites to harvest parallel corpora). He is also the co-founder of Prompsit Language Engineering (2006). Prof. Forcada has participated in the scientific committees of more than thirty international conferences and workshops. During 2009–2010 he was an ETS Walton Visiting Professor in the machine translation group at Dublin City University; during 2016–2017 he was visiting professor at Sheffield University and the University of Edinburgh.