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

Saint Louis University Saint Louis University (SLU) is a private Jesuit research university with campuses in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, and Madrid, Spain. Founded in 1818 by Louis William Valentine DuBourg, it is the oldest university west of the Mississip ...

Career

Kevin Scannell is the professor of mathematics and computer science at

. 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 Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: *Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland *Scottish English *Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...

, and

Manx Manx (; formerly sometimes spelled Manks) is an adjective (and derived noun) describing things or people related to the Isle of Man: * Manx people **Manx surnames * Isle of Man It may also refer to: Languages * Manx language, also known as Manx ...

Gaelics. Scannell is a member of the team which localises platforms including Gmail, Twitter and WhatsApp into Irish. He founded

Indigenous Tweets 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 Math ...

in 2011 to promote the use of social media through indigenous and minority languages. He translated 20 hours worth of coding material into Irish for the

Hour of Code Code.org is a non-profit organization and eponymous website led by Hadi and Ali Partovi that aims to encourage people, particularly school students in the United States, to learn computer science. The website includes free coding lessons, sounds, ...

in 2016. In 2019 he created an Irish language name generator called . In 2019, he won a

Fulbright Scholarship The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

working on developing language technologies for Irish using

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

and

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

in collaboration with researchers at in Carna, County Galway. He is active in developing the Irish-language Wikipedia, and adding Irish content to Wikidata.

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.

References

External links

*
Scannell on the podcast ''Bitesize Irish''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scannell, Kevin 1970 births American translation scholars Living people Saint Louis University faculty American Wikimedians Irish-language writers Linguists from the United States 21st-century linguists