Franz Josef Och is a German computer scientist and currently a researcher at Google.
He studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Germany, where he graduated with a Dipl.Ing. degree in 1998. In 2002 he received his PhD in Computer Science at the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH), Germany.
From 2002 to 2004 he worked as a Research Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). His research activities are in statistical machine translation, natural language processing and machine learning where he has co-authored more than fifty scientific papers. He has written several open-source software packages related to statistical natural language processing and is the chief architect behind Google Translate.