Unbabel opens AI office in the US

Unbabel, the Portuguese automated translation company, is to open an office in Pittsburgh, in the United States, to research and further develop Artificial Intelligence.

The company which combines artificial intelligence with human post editing has taken on Alon Lavie, a well-known pioneer and expert in automatic translation, to head the new office dedicated to AI.
Pittsburgh is famous for the Carnegie Mellon University, one of the most important hubs worldwide in automatic translation research, language processing and applied technology as well as an Artificial Intelligence hub.
Lavie was the former president of the American Machine Translation Association (AMTA) and the International Machine Translation Association. He also managed Amazon’s machine translation and for 20 years was a professor at the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Linguistics Technologies.
One year ago Unbabel successfully closed a Series B round of financing worth $23 million (€25 million).
Unbabel recently opened an office in San Francisco to be nearer to its major clients such as Facebook, Pinterest, Under Armour, Microsoft, Logitech, among others.
Alvon Lavie will be head of research and development at Unbabel in Pittsburgh in cooperation with teams in San Francisco and Lisbon.
Founded in 2013, Unbabel was considered one of the most “sexy” startups in Europe by the magazine Wired.
It is currently building a translation layer for the Internet. Unbabel’s technology platform combines natural language processing, Neural Machine Translation, quality estimation algorithms and a global network of thousands of translators.
This year it partnered with easyJet, one of Europe’s leading low-cost airlines to drive new efficiencies and improved service to its customers across multiple languages by enabling the airline to offer near real-time translation of customer chat and enquiry tickets in up to 29 languages.