Kevin Scannell

Last updated

Kevin Scannell
Kevin Scannell.jpg
Born11 May 1970  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Boston   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Awards
Website kevinscannell.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Academic career
Institutions
Doctoral advisor Geoffrey Mess

Kevin Scannell (born 11 May 1970) is an American professor of mathematics and computer science at Saint Louis University.

Contents

Career

Kevin Scannell is the professor of mathematics and computer science at Saint Louis University. His work focuses on developing online computing resources for small, minority or under-resourced languages, with a particular interest in Irish and other Celtic languages. He has developed an Irish thesaurus, grammar checker, and spell checker, and dictionaries and translation engines for Irish, Scottish, and Manx Gaelics. Scannell is a member of the team which localises platforms including Gmail, Twitter and WhatsApp into Irish. [1] [2] He founded Indigenous Tweets in 2011 to promote the use of social media through indigenous and minority languages. [3] He translated 20 hours worth of coding material into Irish for the Hour of Code in 2016. [4] [5] In 2019 he created an Irish language name generator called Gaelaigh mé. [6]

In 2019, he won a Fulbright Scholarship working on developing language technologies for Irish using deep learning and neural networks in collaboration with researchers at Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge in Carna, County Galway. [1] [2] [7] [8]

He is active in developing the Irish-language Wikipedia, and adding Irish content to Wikidata. [9]

Personal life

Scannell was born on 11 May 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a BS in 1991. In 1996 he was awarded his doctorate from University of California, Los Angeles. He started learning Irish in the 1990s. [10] [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer science</span> Study of computation

Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines to applied disciplines. Though more often considered an academic discipline, computer science is closely related to computer programming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Camel case</span> Writing words with internal uppercase letters

Camel case is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation and with capitalized words. The format indicates the first word starting with either case, then the following words having an initial uppercase letter. Common examples include YouTube, iPhone and eBay. Camel case is often used as a naming convention in computer programming. It is also sometimes used in online usernames such as JohnSmith, and to make multi-word domain names more legible, for example in promoting EasyWidgetCompany.com.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Knuth</span> American computer scientist and mathematician (born 1938)

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".

A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is a high-level computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations aims to provide a higher level of abstraction of the internal computer hardware details, making the language more programmer-friendly, powerful, and versatile. While the definition of 4GL has changed over time, it can be typified by operating more with large collections of information at once rather than focusing on just bits and bytes. Languages claimed to be 4GL may include support for database management, report generation, mathematical optimization, GUI development, or web development. Some researchers state that 4GLs are a subset of domain-specific languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MATLAB</span> Numerical computing environment and programming language

MATLAB is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mizar system</span>

The Mizar system consists of a formal language for writing mathematical definitions and proofs, a proof assistant, which is able to mechanically check proofs written in this language, and a library of formalized mathematics, which can be used in the proof of new theorems. The system is maintained and developed by the Mizar Project, formerly under the direction of its founder Andrzej Trybulec.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guido van Rossum</span> Dutch programmer and creator of Python

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hal Abelson</span> American mathematician

Harold Abelson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, creator of the MIT App Inventor platform, and co-author of the widely-used textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, sometimes also referred to as "the wizard book."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Whitney (computer scientist)</span> Canadian computer scientist

Arthur Whitney is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing three programming languages inspired by APL: A+, k, and q, and for co-founding the U.S. companies Kx Systems and Shakti Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Translate</span> Multilingual neural machine translation service

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, as well as an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. As of 2022, Google Translate supports 133 languages at various levels; it claimed over 500 million total users as of April 2016, with more than 100 billion words translated daily, after the company stated in May 2013 that it served over 200 million people daily.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Scannell</span> Footballer (born 1990)

Sean Scannell is a professional footballer who plays as a winger for Isthmian League Premier Division club Hornchurch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irish language</span> Language native to Ireland

Irish, or Gaelic, also sometimes known outside Ireland as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century. Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in areas of Ireland collectively known as the Gaeltacht, in which only 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2016. It is also spoken by a larger group of habitual but non-traditional speakers, mostly in urban areas where the majority are second-language speakers. From 2006 to 2008, over 22,000 Irish Americans reported speaking Irish as their first language at home, with several times that number claiming "some knowledge" of the language.

Evi is a technology company in Cambridge, England, founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, which specialises in knowledge base and semantic search engine software. Its first product was an answer engine that aimed to directly answer questions on any subject posed in plain English text, which is accomplished using a database of discrete facts. The True Knowledge Answer engine was launched for private beta testing and development on 7 November 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge</span> Third-level educational institution, Galway, Ireland

Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge is a third level educational and research institution headquartered in Galway, Ireland. It was established as part of the National University of Ireland - Galway in 2004, to further the development Irish-medium education. The academy works in co-operation with faculties, departments and other university offices to develop the range and number of programmes that are provided through the medium of Irish on campus and in the academy's Gaeltacht centres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Siri</span> Software-based personal assistant from Apple Inc.

Siri is the digital assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, audioOS, and visionOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services. With continued use, it adapts to users' individual language usages, searches, and preferences, returning individualized results.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kiwix</span> Open-source offline browser for public domain projects

Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia Foundation, public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, many of the Stack Exchange sites, and many other resources. Available in more than 100 languages, Kiwix has been included in several high-profile projects, from smuggling operations in North Korea to Google Impact Challenge's recipient Bibliothèques Sans Frontières.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indigenous Tweets</span>

Indigenous Tweets is a website that records minority language Twitter messages to help indigenous speakers contact each other. It was founded in March 2011 by Kevin Scannell, who does research in computational linguistics in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The website's purpose is to enable minority language speakers to communicate on the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cortana (virtual assistant)</span> Personal assistant by Microsoft

Cortana is a discontinued virtual assistant developed by Microsoft, that used the Bing search engine to perform tasks such as setting reminders and answering questions for users.

Ted Hurley is an Irish mathematician specialising in algebra, specifically in group theory, group rings, cryptography, coding theory, and computer algebra. Most of his academic career was spent at University College Galway. He was Head of Discipline of Mathematics there from 1996 to 2010.

References

  1. 1 2 "Kevin Scannell". Fulbright. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  2. 1 2 Pollak, Sorcha (12 June 2019). "US academic to develop Irish language Siri during 6-month Gaeltacht stay". The Irish Times. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  3. "Kevin Scannell". CorCenCC – National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  4. Kelleher, Patrick (5 December 2016). "An cód: Now children can learn computer coding in Irish for the first time". Independent. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  5. Ó Broin, Ultan (15 January 2017). "An Cód: Craicing the Code in Irish". MultiLingual. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  6. Ó Coimín, Maitiú (12 September 2019). "Don't know your name in Irish? There's an app for that!". IrishCentral.com. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  7. "Kevin Scannell". www.cies.org. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  8. Kelly, Brian (13 June 2019). "Irish language Siri being made for people of Connemara". Galway Daily. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  9. "Strategies for scaling up the Irish language Wikipedia". YouTube . Retrieved 9 July 2020.
  10. "Cadhan Aonair, LLC". cadhan.com. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  11. "Kevin Scannell". Saint Louis University. Retrieved 8 July 2020.