University of Helsinki
My name is Tommi Nieminen, and I recently joined the Helsinki-NLP research group as a new PhD student. For the past two decades, I have worked in the translation industry, starting as a translator and gradually drifting to more technical roles, such as CAT tool support, localization engineering, translation process automation, and machine translation development. Due to my work history, my research focuses mostly on the use of language technology in professional translation.
I have a long history with the University of Helsinki. I enrolled on an MA Philosophy course in the university in 2001, and after a long period of academic absence and part-time study (and a change of disciplines) I finally graduated with an MA in language technology in 2018. Since then I have participated in two academic projects involving the university, Fiskmö and OPUS-MT: Open Translation Models, Tools and Services. In the course of these projects I developed the OPUS-CAT tool, which enables translators to use machine translation models from the OPUS-MT project in their normal working environments. The motivation behind OPUS-CAT is to make open-source machine translation technology and resources directly available to the individual translators, so that they may have more control over how machine translation is integrated into their profession.
I am thrilled to be part of the team in Helsinki and the GreenNLP project, and to work on issues that have recently become more significant than ever before. I live far from Helsinki, so I am usually at the university only one day a week. I look forward to meeting all of you that I have not met yet.
