Office Hours: MW 1:00-2:00 pm, TTh 2:00-3:00 pm, or by appointment
Biography
Steve Richardson received B.S. and M.A. degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics from BYU and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the City University of New York. Prior to joining the BYU CS faculty in November 2021, he was the manager of machine translation at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where he worked for ten years. Before that, he completed a 3-year mission assignment in Brazil, 17 years at Microsoft Research as a Principal and Partner Researcher and manager of the Machine Translation Group, and 11 years at IBM working in NLP, including at the TJ Watson Research Center. He is the past president and current counselor of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. He served previously as president of the International Association for Machine Translation, as well as on numerous advisory boards and conference program committees. He is the author and/or editor of various books, conference proceedings, and research papers, as well as numerous patents in NLP and MT.
Steve’s research is focused on machine translation, now also known as AI translation, and specifically for low-resource languages.
Steve Richardson began his research journey in 1975, working on a BYU project to translate languages with computers. He has worked in this field for over 50 years. He and his lab students focus on using neural models to translate the less common of the world’s 7,000 languages. Their Pathsay AI project has hundreds of BYU Pathway students recording themselves speaking in their native languages to create AI models that can recognize and generate speech in those languages. These models are included in the ToAll automatic video dubbing program that can produce videos in the world’s many languages, with special focus on sharing the gospel with all people.
He manages the MATRIX lab (MAchine Translation Research and Interlingual eXperimentation lab) together with Eric Ringger.
