Alon Lavie, a consulting professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, received the 2021 Makoto Nagao Award of Honor from the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) for his outstanding contributions to machine translation.

The award is given every two years and is named for the late Makoto Nagao, a pioneer in computational linguistics and machine learning. Lavie received the award at the 18th biennial MT Summit, held virtually in August.

In addition to his work at CMU, Lavie is the vice president of language technologies at Unbabel, a language translation startup with offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Portugal. Unbabel was founded in part by Vasco Pedro, who earned his Ph.D. from the LTI in 2009. Lavie, a professor at CMU since 1996, leads and manages the company's artificial intelligence lab in Pittsburgh. He also led Amazon's Machine Translation Research and Development Group in Pittsburgh after it acquired Safaba Translation Solutions, a company he co-founded.