Local college uses AI to translate the Bible
Computer science professors Britton Wolfe and Brian Dickinson and their students have been working with SIL Global, a faith-based nonprofit that uses machine learning to develop language solutions, according to a news release from the college.
The students and faculty have conducted research that focuses on the use of algorithms to automate biblical translation. The work focuses on simplifying the conversion of language characters into common Roman (or Latin) script.
'The full Bible is available in only about 10% of all languages. One of the primary applications of our work is completing the Bible translations in languages where it is partially complete,' Dickinson said.
The current and former students who have worked on the project include Jonathan Allarassem, '24; Allison Harnly, '27; Alex Hemmerlin, '25; Keith Graybill Jr.; Hannah Proctor, '26; and John Bauer, '27.
Dr. Brian Dillinger, the chair of the Computer Science program, released a statement:
'I think the work they're doing is a great model of what we want our students to do: to be thoughtful about how their skills as computer scientists can contribute uniquely to the Kingdom of God,' Dillinger said.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Elon Musk's teen prodigy Kairan Quazi is ditching SpaceX for billionaire Ken Griffin's Citadel Securities
At just 16 years old, Kairan Quazi has already gained accolades most engineers spend decades accumulating. He graduated from college, helped design software for SpaceX Starlink satellites, and turned down offers from Silicon Valley's buzzy AI labs. Now, the prodigy is taking his next leap—not in Silicon Valley, but on Wall Street, where he's joining Citadel Securities, a liquidity provider, as a quant developer. A defiant attitude Quazi's path has been unconventional from the start. At 9, he left third grade for community college, went on to intern at Intel Labs at 10, and transferred to Santa Clara University at 11, eventually becoming the youngest graduate in its 172-year history. In 2023, he made headlines when Elon Musk's SpaceX hired him at just 14 years old. A 'rare company,' Quazi said at the time, that didn't use his age as an 'arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.' The same year, he sparred with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn after it locked him out of the platform for being under 16, blasting the decision as 'illogical, primitive nonsense.' In fact, Quazi has never been shy about critiquing the traditional system that held him back. Once LinkedIn allowed him back on to their platform, Quazi posted a comment slamming the conventional school system. The 16-year-old argued that 'tests are not used to measure mastery, but the ability to regurgitate' and that the modern 'school factory' rewards fear and prestige-chasing over learning. 'Age, privilege, and unconscious (sometimes even conscious) biases are used to gatekeep opportunities,' he wrote, adding that philosophers like Seneca the Younger and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius might have seen today's education system as dangerous. Two years later, Quazi is channeling that same defiance into a different arena. He turned down offers from top AI startups and tech firms to join Citadel Securities this week in New York, citing the firm's culture of meritocracy and instant feedback. 'Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI research also provides, but with a much faster pace,' he told Business Insider. At Citadel Securities he said, he'll be able to see the results of his work in 'days, not months or years.' A win-win Citadel Securities—sister company to the well-known Citadel—for its part, has every reason to trumpet the win. The firm, which handles roughly 35% of U.S. retail stock trades and generated nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2024, is locked in a talent war with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Recruiting a prodigy who was once deemed too young for LinkedIn—but now works at the intersection of engineering and quantitative problem-solving—is a symbolic coup for Ken Griffin's trading powerhouse. For Quazi, the move also closes a personal loop. His mother worked in mergers and acquisitions as an investment banker, giving him early exposure to finance. And on campus, he saw how coveted quant jobs had become for math and computer-science students. 'It's one of the most prestigious industries you could go into as a computer scientist or mathematician,' he told Business Insider. Now, he's living that reality in New York City. Quazi has moved into an apartment just a 10-minute walk from Citadel Securities' Park Avenue office. 'New York has a very special place in my heart,' he said, noting that his mom grew up in Astoria, Queens. Unlike his time at SpaceX, where his mother had to drive him to work in Redmond, Wash., Quazi's commute is now his own: first on foot, and soon, by subway. 'I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment,' he said. 'Citadel Securities offered a similarly ambitious culture, but also a completely new domain, which is very exciting for me.' Jackie Scharnick, Citadel's communications director, said Quazi would pass on an interview with Fortune so he could 'focus on his second day of work.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Elon Musk's teen prodigy Kairan Quazi is ditching SpaceX for billionaire Ken Griffin's Citadel Securities
At just 16 years old, Kairan Quazi has already gained accolades most engineers spend decades accumulating: graduated college, helped design software for SpaceX Starlink satellites, and turned down officers from Silicon Valley's buzzy AI labs. Now, the prodigy is taking his next leap—not in Silicon Valley, but on Wall Street, where he's joining Citadel Securities, a liquidity provider, as a quant developer. A defiant attitude Quazi's path has been unconventional from the start. At 9, he left third grade for community college, went on to intern at Intel Labs at 10, and transferred to Santa Clara University at 11, eventually becoming the youngest graduate in its 172-year history. In 2023, he made headlines when Elon Musk's SpaceX hired him at just 14 years old, a 'rare company,' Quazi said at the time, that didn't use his age as an 'arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.' The same year, he sparred with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn after it locked him out of the platform for being under 16, blasting the decision as 'illogical, primitive nonsense.' In fact, Quazi has never been shy about critiquing the traditional system that held him back. Once LinkedIn allowed him back on to their platform, Quazi posted a comment slamming the conventional school system. The 16-year-old argued 'tests are not used to measure mastery, but the ability to regurgitate,' and that the modern 'school factory' rewards fear and prestige-chasing over learning. 'Age, privilege, and unconscious (sometimes even conscious) biases are used to gatekeep opportunities,' he wrote, adding that philosophers like Seneca the Younger and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius might have seen today's education system as dangerous. Two years later, Quazi is channeling that same defiance into a different arena. He turned down offers from top AI startups and tech firms to join Citadel Securities this week in New York, citing the firm's culture of meritocracy and instant feedback. 'Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI research also provides, but with a much faster pace,' he told Business Insider. At Citadel Securities he said, he'll be able to see the results of his work in 'days, not months or years.' A win-win Citadel Securities — the sister company to the well-known Citadel — for its part, has every reason to trumpet the win. The firm, which handles roughly 35% of U.S. retail stock trades and generated nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2024, is locked in a talent war with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Recruiting a prodigy who was once deemed too young for LinkedIn—but now works at the intersection of engineering and quantitative problem-solving—is a symbolic coup for Ken Griffin's trading powerhouse. For Quazi, the move also closes a personal loop. His mother worked in mergers and acquisitions as an investment banker, giving him early exposure to finance. And on campus, he saw how coveted quant jobs had become for math and computer-science students. 'It's one of the most prestigious industries you could go into as a computer scientist or mathematician,' he told Business Insider. Now, he's living that reality in New York City. Quazi has moved into an apartment just a 10-minute walk from Citadel Securities' Park Avenue office. 'New York has a very special place in my heart,' he said, noting that his mom grew up in Astoria, Queens. Unlike his time at SpaceX, where his mother had to drive him to work in Redmond, Washington, Quazi's commute is now his own: first on foot, and soon, by subway. 'I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment,' he said. 'Citadel Securities offered a similarly ambitious culture, but also a completely new domain, which is very exciting for me.' Jackie Scharnick, Citadel's communications director, said Quazi would pass on an interview with Fortune so he could 'focus on his second day of work.' This story was originally featured on Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
What was the first human species?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. All humans today are members of the modern human species Homo sapiens — Latin for "knowing man." But we're far from the only humans who ever existed. Fossils are revealing more and more about early humans in the genus Homo — ancestors like Homo erectus (Latin for "upright man"), who lived in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe between 1.9 million and 110,000 years ago. Scientists now recognize more than a dozen species in the Homo genus. So what, exactly, was the first human species? The answer, it turns out, is not crystal clear. Fossil finds in Morocco have revealed that anatomically modern humans emerged at least 300,000 years ago. But the oldest human species scientists definitively know about is called Homo habilis, or "handy man" — a tool-using primate who walked upright and lived in Africa between 2.4 million and 1.4 million years ago. However, earlier fossils hint that other Homo species may predate H. habilis. The scarcity of early human fossils makes it challenging to know if unusual specimens are a newfound species or simply an atypical member of a known species. On top of that, evolution can be gradual, so it's hard to pinpoint when a new species emerges, especially when fossils have a mix of features from different species. "The process of evolution is continuous, but the labels we place on it for convenience are static," Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California Berkeley, told Live Science. Related: Why did Homo sapiens outlast all other human species? Earliest Homo Most evolutionary theories suggest that H. habilis evolved from an earlier genus of primate named Australopithecus — Latin for "southern ape" because its fossils were first discovered in South Africa. Sign up for our newsletter Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online. Various species of Australopithecus lived from about 4.4 million to 1.4 million years ago. It may be that H. habilis evolved directly from the species Australopithecus afarensis — the best-known example of which is "Lucy," who was unearthed at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974. The fossils of our genus are usually distinguished from Australopithecus fossils by Homo's distinctively smaller teeth and a relatively large brain, which led to the greater use of stone tools. But White noted that traits like smaller teeth and bigger brains must have emerged at times in the Australopithecus populations that early Homo evolved from. "If you had an Australopithecus female, there wasn't a birth at which point she would have christened the child Homo," he said. As a result, there is no fixed point in time in which Homo originated; instead, the Homo genus emerged roughly between 2 million and 3 million years ago, White said. Evolving in Africa Since the 1970s, researchers in Africa have discovered fossils that they've attributed to another ancient species, Homo rudolfensis, which challenges the idea that H. habilis was the earliest Homo. H. rudolfensis seems to have been physically much bigger, had a larger brain and a flatter facial structure than H. habilis, which may have made it look more like a modern human. Its fossils are roughly the same age as H. habilis — as much as 2.4 million years old. But "there is only one really good fossil of this Homo rudolfensis," according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, so scientists don't know if H. rudolfensis is an unusual H. habilis or even an Austrolopithicus with a larger-than-usual brain. Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, who heads the Smithsonian Institute's Human Origins program, told Live Science that even older fossils from Africa appear to be from the genus Homo and may predate both of those species. RELATED MYSTERIES —What did the last common ancestor between humans and apes look like? —Are Neanderthals and Homo sapiens the same species? —Why did Homo sapiens emerge in Africa? The oldest of those fossils date from about 2.8 million years ago, but they are only fragments — a few jaw bones and a few teeth — so they are not enough to establish if they came from a different, unnamed species of Homo, he said. A 2025 study found additional teeth dating to 2.59 million and 2.78 million years old that may also belong to this mysterious early Homo species. So it may be that the first human species has not yet been found. "There's a whole lot of excitement, but there is also a lot of uncertainty, about trying to discover more about the origins of the genus Homo," Potts said. Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens? Solve the daily Crossword
