Press & Media Kit Petro Orynycz

Bios

Professional bios

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Short bio

Petro Orynycz is a Hungarian American AI engineer and computational linguist from Washington, DC. He trains, fine-tunes and deploys large language models for heritage and indigenous language communities, and built the world’s first Lemko translation engine. His research is published by Springer Nature and has been presented at I/ITSEC, the world’s largest modelling, simulation and training conference.

Long bio

Petro Orynycz (Петро Оринич) is a Hungarian American AI engineer and computational linguist from Washington, DC. He trains, fine-tunes and deploys large language models for heritage and indigenous language communities, especially in low-resource settings. His family’s Lemko roots lead to villages in today’s Poland and Slovakia.

He built and deployed the world’s first Lemko translation engine, LemkoTran, with published BLEU scores six times higher than Google Translate’s Ukrainian service, and followed it with the Rusynator, an AI translator into Rusyn for Slovakia. His research appears in Springer Nature’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (HCI International 2022 and 2023) and in the proceedings of I/ITSEC, where he has presented his results. In April 2026 he gave a guest lecture on AI tools for Rusyn and Lemko at the Technical University of Košice.

His career began in heavy industry as a language specialist and led through investigations work in the post-Soviet oil and gas sector, a global translation business serving clients such as BMW, Mercedes and Siemens, and contributions to the Google Translate project during its neural translation breakthrough. He went on to lead hundreds of linguists as a project manager and localization engineer at a defense contractor, and has worked as a senior software engineer at a Virginia enterprise for six years.

He graduated from the Institute of East Slavic Languages at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Today he fine-tunes language models for low-resource and endangered languages, runs ByteClub.ai, a hands-on AI engineering program, and hosts heritage language meetups.

Speaking

Speaking topics

• AI engineeringTraining, fine-tuning and deploying language models in real systems.
• Agentic AIAI agents that plan, use tools and get real work done.
• Machine translationNeural translation for languages the big platforms leave out.
• Endangered languagesHow AI can help communities keep their languages in daily use.
• Building software with AITurning plain English into working software.

Projects

Selected projects

Credibility

Research and speaking

Photography

Official photos

Petro Orynycz in Times Square, New York. High-resolution JPGs for editorial use in coverage of Petro and his work.

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