Client Spotlight: Ultralingua
In 1997, Jeff Ondich was living the sporadically peaceful life of a professor of computer science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. That's when his friend Scott Carpenter, professor of French language and literature at Carleton, asked Jeff whether he knew any students who could help Scott develop a small electronic French-English dictionary. Though Jeff thought the project sounded a bit ambitious for a student carrying a full course load, he offered to work on it himself.
Before long, the little dictionary project became Ultralingua, Inc., whose portfolio of multi-lingual software tools has now grown to include electronic dictionaries for fifteen language combinations, grammar checking and correcting tools, an on-line multi-lingual dictionary service, a thematic encyclopedia, and several software packages that can be used by software developers who wish to incorporate cross-language services into their own products. As CTO, Jeff is author and maintainer of the core code driving all of Ultralingua's dictionary products, and has a hand in most of the user interfaces as well. In early 2006, when the development work had expanded beyond Jeff's ability to keep track of it all, MentorMate came to the rescue, and now develops and maintains several Ultralingua user interfaces.
Jeff continues to teach at Carleton, where his students keep him up-to-date on the latest cool technologies. His main academic interests are similar to his Ultralingua interests: software engineering and natural language processing (how do you get a computer to do something useful with "natural" languages like English or French as opposed to formal languages like C++ or Java?).
Born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, Jeff received a B.A. in mathematics from St. Olaf College in 1983, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1989. He returned to St. Olaf to teach for two years, after which he joined the faculty at Carleton in 1991. He lives in Northfield with his wife, son, daughter, three cats, and an eighty-pound dog who is afraid of a five-pound cat.
Ultralingua Web Site
