One of the researchers, Tuomas Sundholm, has a real badass CV. Former pilot in the Finnish airforce. Finnish windsurfer champion. Snowboarder. Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Speaks four european languages, including swedish. And now at the age of 51, he has created the best AI powered poker bot. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cv.pdf
Not to belittle the man's other achievements but speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe, except when you're from the UK.
Northern Europe, maybe. French people for instance tend to suck at foreign languages. We rarely go beyond 3 languages (French, English, then German or Spanish. The last two are often forgotten after school.)
I suspect Spain and Italy are similar.