Dr. James Mayfield is Principal Computer Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, and holds an Associate Research Professorship at the Johns Hopkins Computer Science department. His PhD is from the University of California at Berkeley in the area of natural language processing. Dr. Mayfield, who has authored or co-authored over 100 professional communications, has been the PI or co-PI on programs sponsored by DoD, NASA, DARPA, ARDA and MIPS. Much of his research has examined language-neutral techniques for multilingual and translingual text processing. Dr. Mayfield has developed numerous large software systems, and has taught a wide variety of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He oversaw the development and execution of the TAC Cold Start Knowledge Base Population task, which asked participants to build systems that construct a knowledge base reflecting the content of a large text collection. His current research includes work in cross-language information retrieval, named entity recognition over OCR output and other degraded texts, and information extraction.