Originally from Germany, Achim Ruopp's passion in life is adapting software to other languages. In 1997 Ruopp left Germany to work for Microsoft, where he focused on software localization and internationalization. After eight years, Ruopp decided to leave the software giant to go back to school.

Achim Ruopp

"I had been self-studying the field of computational linguistics," Ruopp says, "but the UW's Computational Linguistics program gave me the opportunity to be really motivated and very involved."

Ruopp loves that the program offers a broad overview of the computational linguistics field. "The program is very appropriate. It truly is a blend of both linguistics and computer science."

One aspect of the UW Computational Linguistics program that Ruopp enjoys is the course offerings geared toward other languages, which allow him to further his interest in the processing of multilingual text data. Ruopp also likes the program's innovative projects in the field of machine translation and information retrieval.

In the future, Ruopp plans to start his own company specializing in multilingual natural language processing. "The program has given me the next step up and I will be able to apply this knowledge for years and years to come."

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