Alexandra Birch
Co-Founder, Chief Scientist at The University of Edinburgh
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexandra Birch is a computational linguist and entrepreneur with 11 years of experience building multilingual NLP systems, currently serving as Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Aveni and Professor and Chair of Multilingual Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. Her career bridges deep academic research—rising from Senior Research Associate to a chaired professorship—and commercial productization of language technologies since 2018. She has a PhD from Edinburgh and a long track record in statistical machine translation, machine learning and applied NLP, bringing research rigor to real-world conversational AI. Known for translating complex multilingual models into deployable systems, she combines leadership in a startup with ongoing academic stewardship, mentoring the next generation of NLP researchers. An understated strength is her sustained commitment to both foundational research and practical engineering across academia-industry boundaries.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at The University of EdinburghBachelor's degree - Hons, Bachelor's degree - Hons at University of Cape Town
Spanish, Afrikaans
Github Skills (11)
neural-machine-translation8
gpu7
cuda7
cpp6
phonetics5
acl4
machine-translation4
data-annotation4
natural-language-processing4
computational-linguistics3
nlp2
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
lexibirch/lexibirch.github.io
Nov 2020 - Aug 2022
Github Pages template for academic personal websites, forked from mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Contributions:18 pushes in 1 year 9 months
templategithub-pages-templatemmistakesmistakesjekyll
EdinburghNLP/gourmet-models
Nov 2021 - Jun 2022
Machine translation models released by the Gourmet project (https://gourmet-project.eu)
Contributions:5 commits, 5 pushes in 7 months
machine-translation
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