Franz Och, PhD

Chief Data Scientist

Franz Och, PhD is HLI’s Chief Data Scientist. A renowned expert in machine learning and machine translation, Och’s is responsible for developing new computational methods to translate the human biological information in the forms of the whole human genome, microbiome, and protein sequencing data into the language of human health and disease using human phenotype data.

Och and his team of research scientists and software engineers will be based in Mountain View, California.

From 2004 until joining HLI in July 2014, Och was a research scientist and manager leading Google’s Machine Translation Group. Och, who has been working on statistical machine translation since 1997, joined Google to research new ways by which Google could offer a much better machine translation system to their users, by employing an approach that uses massive amount of data. In just a few short years he and his team revolutionized online translation. Now more than 80 different languages can be translated.

Before joining Google Och was a researcher in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, working on DARPA projects related to language translation.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen, Germany.