Kevin Scannell is a former professor of mathematics and computer science with 25+ years of software and research experience focused on natural language processing, machine learning, and language technology for minority and under-resourced languages. He founded and leads Cadhan Aonair, LLC, while bringing three decades of academic teaching and multidisciplinary research across mathematics, physics, linguistics, and CS. Kevin has contributed to high-profile open-source projects—improving Twitter’s text-processing character support and localizing Mozilla’s Common Voice for Irish—demonstrating practical internationalization and corpus expertise. His work spans parsing, machine translation, semantic networks, lexicography, and web corpora, blending deep theoretical knowledge with production-grade engineering. A Fulbright scholar and long-time Mozilla localizer, he’s known for quietly solving thorny multilingual edge cases that most systems ignore.
25 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Mathematics, B.S., Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Common Voice is part of Mozilla's initiative to help teach machines how real people speak.
Role in this project:
Localization / Internationalization Specialist
Contributions:34 commits, 2 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Kevin's commits focus on updating the Irish (ga-IE) localization for the Common Voice project. Their work involves translating and modifying text strings within the `messages.ftl` files, which are part of the project's localization efforts. These changes include updates across multiple files to improve language accuracy and incorporate new features or content. This demonstrates a dedication to refining the user experience for Irish language speakers.
A JavaScript implementation of Twitter's text processing library
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:5 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Kevin contributed to the `twitter-text-js` library by adding support for a wider range of characters in hashtag and text processing. Their commits focused on expanding the character sets recognized by the library to include various Latin accented characters, the Okina character for Hawaiian, and characters from Hebrew, Arabic, and Thai scripts. Furthermore, they incorporated diacritics and punctuation marks like maqaf, geresh, and gershayim to improve the functionality of the text processing library.
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Kevin Scannell - Sole Member at Cadhan Aonair, LLC