New team member: Ona de Gibert Bonet

Hello everyone!

My name is Ona de Gibert Bonet and I am thrilled to introduce myself as a new PhD student in the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. I joined the Helsinki-NLP group in January this year.

To tell you a bit about my background, I was born and raised in Barcelona. I received a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literature from the University of Barcelona (2016) and earned a M.S. in Language Analysis and Processing from the University of the Basque Country (2018).

I am passionate about Machine Translation (MT), which is what led me to pursue a PhD in Language Technology. I am excited to join the research team led by Jörg Tiedemann, where I will be exploring MT for low-resourced languages with a focus on knowledge distillation. I believe that this research area has great potential to make a positive impact on the democratization of MT, broadening its accessibility, and I am eager to contribute to this work.

Apart from my academic interests, I love dancing ballet and lindy hop. In my free time, you can often find me doing very Finnish things: knitting or in the sauna. Both activities help me relax and clear my mind after a long day of research.

Thank you for taking the time to read my presentation, and I cannot wait to see what this academic journey has in store for us all. If you see me around campus, please don’t hesitate to say hello!

Best,
Ona