Carl W. Hoffman (Cambridge, Massachusetts) was educated at MIT and worked as a member of the research staff at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science from 1976 to 1982. From 1983 to 1994, he worked at Symbolics, Inc. and later as an independent consultant on software internationalization to a wide range of financial services, database, and communications companies. In 1995, Carl founded Basis Technology to assist New England software publishers in localizing their products for overseas markets. Since then, he has built Basis Technology to become the leading provider of cross-platform software components for internationalization and multilingual information retrieval. Basis Technology has assisted over 200 companies in internationalizing their products and services, including such leading software and Internet firms as Amazon.com, Ask Jeeves, Cisco Systems, Convera, Endeca, FAST, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Lycos, PeopleSoft, Verity, and Yahoo. In 2001, Carl was honored by the Massachusetts eCommerce Association for his work establishing Amazon.com in Japan. During the last two years, Carl has focused his attention on providing multilingual technology to defense contractors and government agencies involved in homeland security.