Franz Josef Och is a German

Germans

The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....

 computer scientist and currently a researcher at Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

.

Life and Work

He studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Germany, where he graduated with a Dipl.Ing. degree in 1998. In 2002 he received his PhD

PHD

PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH), Germany.

From 2002 to 2004 he worked as a Research Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California

University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

 (USC). His research activities are in statistical machine translation, natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

 and machine learning where he has co-authored more than fifty scientific papers. He has written several open-source software packages related to statistical natural language processing and
is the chief architect behind Google Translate

Google Translate

Google Translate is a free statistical machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.The service was introduced in April 28, 2006 for the Arabic language...

.

External links

• Franz Josef Och at Google Research
• Google and Facebook roll out Farsi language tools, The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
  , June 19, 2009
• Franz Josef Och, Google's translation uber-scientist, talks about Google Translate, David Sarno, Los Angeles Times
  Los Angeles Times
  The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
  
  , March 11, 2010
• Can Google break the computer language barrier?, Tim Adams, The Observer
  The Observer
  The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
  
  , December 19, 2010