Elijah Mayfield is the founder of LightSIDE Labs, a company in Pittsburgh, PA building platforms for automated assessment of student-written texts using machine learning. In 2012, Elijah was invited to participate in the ASAP Competition, held by the Hewlett Foundation and Kaggle.com, where LightSIDE demonstrated that the state-of-the-art in automated assessment matches human reliability. His work with LightSIDE has been highlighted across a variety of news sources including NPR Morning Edition, Education Week, and Science.
Elijah is also a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute. His work there has earned him a 2011 Siebel Scholarship and a 2013 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. In this role, Elijah’s research focuses on using machine learning to better understand and recognize social cues in conversation, with an emphasis on authoritativeness, expertise, and empowerment. In practice, he is using these insights to improve understanding of real-world problems in collaborative learning, healthcare support groups, and clinical interactions. His research has resulted in more than 25 peer-reviewed articles in top-tier venues in computational linguistics and applied machine learning.