Mark A. Przybocki (Fed)

Mark Przybocki is the Chief of the Information Access Division in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). He joined ITL’s Spoken Natural Language Processing Group in 1993 with a BS in computer scientist from UMBC. In his first role at NIST, Mark assisted with the group’s implementation of speech recognition technology evaluations. The well-established evaluation-driven research paradigm was readily applied to a variety of data types and technologies with a focus on human speech, text, video and multimodal technologies. Eventually, the group was renamed first to “The Speech Group”, and later to “The Multimodal Information Group” (MIG). During his NIST career Mark has led projects in speaker and language recognition, information extraction and machine translation. While working at NIST he received his MS from Hood College in computer and information science. From 2010 through 2019 Mark served as the Group Leader for MIG. This time included a 2018 detail to the Program Coordination Office which Mark credits to expanding his network and increasing his knowledge and understanding of how NIST operates. In October 2019 he began serving as the acting Chief for the Information Access Division, and a few months later he began concurrently serving as acting Group Leader for the Visualization and Usability Group. Mark is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusivity and has help to establish a yearly process that enables ITL to recruit students from a local HBCU. Plans are in the works to expand that effort in the future.