Mikel Forcada is professor of computer languages and systems at the Universitat d’Alacant. He is president of the European Association for Machine Translation. Mikel has also worked in fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, biotechnology, surface physics, machine learning (especially with neural networks) and automata theory. He is the author of more than 70 articles in international journals, papers in international conferences and book chapters. In 2004, after heading several publicly- and privately-funded projects on machine translation, Mikel started the free/open source machine translation platform Apertium, where he is currently the president of the project management committee.