Gabriel Fairman (Bureau Works) took home the 2023 Innovator of the Year – USA Award at LocWorld’s 15th Process Innovation Challenge, which took place on the 11th of October at LocWorld50 in San Jose, USA.

The innovation “BWX Generative Language Engine- translation smells” makes contextualised decisions on the fly and can be powered by GPT instances from Azure and Open AI or custom instances. This means open AI becomes a linguistic problem solver, rather than just a “prompt and response” mechanism. Benefits incude cutting editing time by over 50%, maintaining control for linguists and enhancing the overall human translation experience. 

The runner-up this time was  Mathijs Sonnemans (Blackbird International Inc) with the innovation, “Setting up Custom LLM Orchestrations in Minutes” using custom and smart LangChain solutions, so everyone can be “AI powered”.

In third place was Catarina Farinha (Unbabel) with the innovation “Content Transcreation Layer for Cultural Awareness using Responsible Generative AI” which showed a really smart way of transcreating live messages so that they had the appropriate cultural forms which the sender would expect. 

As PIC founder and co-host, Dave Ruane put it; “Generative AI technology implementations showed up directly in 4 of the 6 final innovations. This marks a significant shift in terms of the speed at which workable implementations of a new technology platform appears at the PIC. I expect innovators will take note of this and look at ways to accelerate the time to market of new generative and adaptive based innovations, during the next 12 months. We had our biggest live final audience (over 350 localization professionals), and got some amazing feedback and engagement for our innovators live on site. Thanks to all our innovators, dragons (judges), and Jason Mars and Monte Wilson who contributed thought leadership from the innovation and investment communities. ” 

The PIC dragons this time were Alessandra Binazzi (Globalization Strategy Consulting), Erik Vogt (), and Ben Cornelius ().  Alex Bernet (LocWorld), and Dave Ruane (XTM International) produced and hosted the event. We would also like to thank Multilingual Magazine, LocWorld, and XTM International for supporting the event.

The innovators and innovations at the final of the 15th PIC event were:

  1. Gabriel Fairman – Bureau Works – “Generative Language Engine”
  2. Catarina Farinha – Unbabel – “Content Transcreation Layer for Cultural
    Awareness using Responsible Generative AI”
  3. Sheriff Issaka – African Languages Lab – “All Voices: Empowering Text and
    Audio Data Collection and Validation for Low-Resourced Languages”
  4. Emily Randall – Uber – “Quill: Bringing context to the “Point of
    Translation”
  5. Mathijs Sonnemans – Blackbird International Inc – “Setting up Custom LLM
    Orchestrations in Minutes”
  6. Ágnes Varga – memoQ – “Adaptive Generative Translation (AGT)”

Congratulations to all of our 6 outstanding finalists on a competitive and entertaining competition as well as those who participated in earier rounds!

The next PIC  event will be held in June in Dublin at LocWorld51; the Call for Papers will open duiring November 2023. 

Do you have a localization process or technology innovation for the PIC “stage”? Contact Dave Ruane or Alex Bernet directly for information.