Eisteddfod Science and Technology Medal winner announced

Dewi Bryn Jones

The winner of this year’s Science and Technology Medal at the National Eisteddfod in Wrecsam is Dewi Bryn Jones, a leading pioneer in Welsh language and speech technologies.

Over recent years, Dewi has done more than anyone else to develop Welsh computational language tools and resources, enabling the public to use Welsh on their computers and in digital communication. His technologies also support disabled individuals and those with additional needs to communicate in Welsh.

Dewi leads a team of software developers at the Language Technologies Unit at Canolfan Bedwyr, Bangor University. His vision and contributions have driven innovation in Welsh writing technology, Welsh speech technology, and Welsh machine translation in the digital world.

The medal, first awarded in 2004, recognises and celebrates an individual’s contribution to science and technology through the medium of Welsh. Fittingly, the first recipient was Professor Glyn O Phillips, a prominent scientist from Wrecsam and the founding head of the North East Wales Institute – now Wrexham University.

The medal honours and celebrates outstanding contributions to the science and technology industry through Welsh.

Ceremony

Dewi Bryn Jones will be honoured in a special ceremony at the Pavilion on the Eisteddfod Maes at 1.30pm on Thursday 7 August.

Professor Delyth Prys, former head of the technology unit at Canolfan Bedwyr, said, “The award is thoroughly deserved by Dewi. I would go so far as to say that without his contribution, we wouldn’t have any Welsh software today.”

Professor Deri Tomos, a previous recipient of the Science and Technology Medal, added, “This unit is absolutely vital to the future of the language. Dewi lives and breathes the world of computing – it’s a core part of his life, and I’m sure he’s delighted to receive this honour.”

Dewi Bryn Jones, was raised in Pwllheli and graduated in Computer Science from the University of York. He worked in Cambridge, Zurich, and later joined Nokia in Finland. While in Helsinki, he began translating and localising Netscape Navigator, an early web browser before the days of Google and others.

He returned to Wales to work with Draig Technology Ltd, contributing to the development of To Bach, a program that helps add accents to Welsh words while typing, which has now been downloaded over 100,000 times.

In 2002, Dewi joined the Language Technologies Unit at Canolfan Bedwyr, where he continues to lead a team of software developers and collaborate with terminologists and linguists. He is now researching new developments in Artificial Intelligence technologies, which are revolutionising the field but pose challenges for minority languages like Welsh.

“Honour”

Dewi said, “It’s a great pleasure and honour to do this work and to be part of a team of others who are just as enthusiastic and talented – more talented than me. It’s a unit of software developers and language experts with a mix of skills to create all this work. We’re creating apps that work in Welsh and showing that it’s possible to build resources that expand the use of Welsh and normalise the language in the tech world.”

Since joining Canolfan Bedwyr, Dewi has completely rewritten the code for Cysill, the Welsh spelling and grammar checker, to make it compatible with modern computers and networks. He led the development of Cysgliad, which includes Cysill and the electronic dictionary suite Cysgeir, first published in 2004 and still maintained and developed today.

He has also developed many of the databases and computing platforms that support general and terminological Welsh dictionaries, including the digital version of Geiriadur yr Academi, and is responsible for developing and maintaining Y Porth Termau Cenedlaethol.

Over twenty years ago, Dewi began researching speech technology for Welsh, collaborating with researchers in Ireland working on similar technology for Irish Gaelic. He has developed synthetic Welsh voices that give speech to people who cannot speak due to medical reasons, as well as voices for games and other digital products.

In 2017, he developed Lleisiwr, which enables NHS Wales patients to create synthetic Welsh versions of their own voice before losing the ability to speak, with an innovative bilingual version following in 2020. He is currently working with the NHS and a Scottish company to create a variety of bilingual synthetic voices with different accents for children and young people in Wales.

Many of these technologies have been combined in Macsen, the first Welsh-language personal assistant, which can be controlled using Welsh voice commands and includes a range of Welsh-language skills such as weather updates, news, music, Wikipedia searches, translation, and more.

Dewi has also played a key role in including Welsh in Mozilla’s international Common Voice project, which allows volunteers to contribute their voices to an open database of recordings that supports the development of speech technology in many languages.

He was central to the successful efforts to establish a Master’s degree in Language Technologies at Bangor University, where he now lectures. He also supervised the first PhD in Speech Technology through the medium of Welsh and was the main author of the Language Technologies Handbook – the first of its kind written in Welsh on language and speech technologies.

The National Eisteddfod in Wrecsam will be held in Is-y-Coed from 2–9 August. For more information and to buy tickets, visit eisteddfod.cymru.

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