Kevin Scannell

Kevin Scannell
Born11 May 1970 Edit this on Wikidata
Boston Edit this on Wikidata
Awards
Websitekevinscannell.com Edit this at Wikidata
Academic career
Institutions
Doctoral advisorGeoffrey Mess

Kevin Scannell (Irish: Caoimhín Ó Scanaill; born 11 May 1970) is an American professor of mathematics and computer science at Saint Louis University.

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]

References

  1. ^ a b "Kevin Scannell". Fulbright. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  2. ^ a b 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.