UNICODE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Chairman of the W3C Internationalization Working Group
- Chairman, CLDR Message Format Subcommittee
- New Chair of the Message Formatting Working Group
Addison Phillips is the new Chair of the Message Formatting Working Group. Addison is also the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group and an active participant in the creation of internationalization standards such as Unicode. He is a co-author of IETF BCP 47, which is the standard for language and locale identifiers.
Job Titles:
- Legal Executive
- Vice President, General Counsel & Compliance
Anne is an experienced legal executive with 30 years in private practice and in-house legal roles. From 2013-2019 she served as vice president for global intellectual property for Swarovski, a global fashion jewelry brand based in central Europe. Before that she held various positions over a decade in the Intel legal department including vice president for global public policy, vice president for global sales & marketing legal affairs, and director of trademarks & brands. Early in her career she was an associate at Fenwick & West and director of trademarks at Sun Microsystems. Since retiring from Swarovski, Anne has been a consultant and has served as a World Intellectual Property Organization domain name panelist under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy of ICANN.
Anne has long been a leader in the global IP bar. She served on the Board of Directors of the International Trademark Association for nearly a decade and served as the Association's president in 2005. From 2006 to 2008 she served as chair of the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights. She was one of the drafters of the U.S. Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006.
Anne has also long been a supporter of the Unicode Consortium and its work, providing pro bono IP counsel since the mid ‘90s. She is also a proud Gold Sponsor of the Comma (U+002C) and the Trademark Symbol (U+2122).
Job Titles:
- Program Manager
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, CLDR Technical Committee
Annemarie is a program manager on Android at Google. She holds a B.A. in linguistics and Dutch studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Job Titles:
- Group Engineering Manager of the Office Core Experiences
Ayman is the Group Engineering Manager of the Office Core Experiences team responsible for the shared components that Office use to build their applications, including UX, UI platform, text rendering and editing, font management and accessibility. Prior to this, Ayman managed different internationalization teams that built the globalization and localization platform for Office applications, including multilingual and machine translation features. Ayman started at Microsoft in 1990 as a software design engineer and worked on BiDirectional enabling of some of Microsoft key products including DOS, Windows, IE, Word and PowerPoint. Ayman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from University of Arizona.
Job Titles:
- Director of Engineering for Internationalization at Google
Bob is the Director of Engineering for Internationalization at Google. He built and leads the globally distributed team that develops highly scalable technologies and infrastructure used throughout Google to deliver internationalized and localized products. Previously, at Netscape, he built the team that established much of the early work on internationalization for the web and browsers. Even earlier, he helped drive the initial Unix/POSIX internationalization specifications and standards via work with industry consortiums (/usr/grp, Uniforum, Unix International). Prior to Google, Bob worked for Netscape/AOL, Apple, MIPS, Nippon Unisoft and UniSoft. He holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Job Titles:
- Director of Product Development and General Manager for Adobe Fonts and Type at Adobe
Brent Getlin is the Director of Product Development and General Manager for Adobe Fonts and Type at Adobe. His passion for visual communication and technology drove him to study both film at Northwestern University and Computer Engineering at Southern Methodist University. Prior to his work with Fonts and Type, Brent managed Adobe's mobile gaming engineering team, led engineering for the Macromedia Flash video encoder, and co-authored W3C's SVG 1.0 Specification and the ActionScript 3.0 language standard.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, Unicode Technical Committee
Craig Cummings has been working in the field of software globalization for over 30 years. He has worked at Amazon, VMware, Yahoo!, Oracle, and a few other companies - working across many technologies including software virtualization, big data, games, and consumer and enterprise products.
Craig has been serving as Chair of the ANSI/INCITS Character Sets and Internationalization Committee -- and in a dual role as Unicode Technical Committee Vice Chair -- for nearly 12 years. Since 2018, Craig has been working with indigenous language communities to improve support for these languages on computers and mobile devices.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, CLDR Digitally Disadvantaged Languages Subcommittee
David joined SIL in 1985. He is currently part of SIL's Writing Systems Technology team.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Developer
- Vice - Chair
- Chairman, UTC CJK & Unihan Group Vice - Chair, UTC Emoji Subcommittee
Dr Ken Lunde has been a Font Developer at Apple since 2021, and serves as one of Apple's alternate representatives to the Unicode Consortium. He worked at Adobe from 1991 until 2019 where he specialized in East Asian type development, along with the development of related standards and specifications. His more notable accomplishments include the architecting and development of the Adobe-branded "Source Han" and Google-branded "Noto CJK" open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019; authoring and typesetting "CJKV Information Processing" Second Edition (O'Reilly Media, 2009); and publishing over 300 articles on Adobe's now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison; served as Adobe's primary representative to the Unicode Consortium from 2015 until 2019; serves as the IVD Registrar; participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee; attends UTC and IRG meetings; serves as the Unicode Consortium's liaison to CESI, CITPC, SAT, and VNPF; received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award; was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 until 2020; became a Vice Chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in 2019; authored UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property "kStrange") in 2020; and became the Chair of Unicode CJK & Unihan Group in 2021. Ken and his wife enjoy driving their "His & Hers" pair of Tesla Model 3 EVs.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Chairman, CLDR Keyboards Subcommittee
- Principal Product Manager in the Experiences and Devices Group at Microsoft
Dr. Andrew Glass is Principal Product Manager in the Experiences and Devices Group at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 2008 he has specialized in font rendering, keyboards, and input-related user experiences. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies. He is co-editor of "A Dictionary of Gāndhārī" (gandhari.org, 2002-) and author of "Four Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras" (University of Washington Press, 2007). His contributions to Unicode include proposals for the Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts, and Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls. Andrew is the author and maintainer of Microsoft's Universal Shaping Engine specification. Prior to joining Microsoft, he taught at the University of Washington, University of Leiden, and Bukkyō University in Japan.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Technical Director
- Vice - Chair
- Chairman of UTC Script Ad Hoc Group Vice - Chair, Grant Management Committee
Dr. Deborah Anderson joined the Unicode Consortium as a technical director in 2007. Prior to that, she was involved in the Unicode effort as an invited expert, then as UC Berkeley's representative to the Unicode Consortium since 2005. Deborah is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and runs its Script Encoding Initiative (and runs its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project). She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies.She is Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Researcher at Newcastle University
- Vice - Chair, UTC Script Ad Hoc Group Vice - Chair, CLDR Keyboards Subcommittee
Dr. Jan Kučera is a researcher at Newcastle University, where he received Ph.D. degree in Human-Computer Interaction, and he holds M.Sc. degree in Computer Graphics and M.A. degree in Indian Studies from Charles University in Prague. He joined Unicode and the Script Ad Hoc Group in 2014, with special interest in the scripts of south Asia. He is the author of kbdlayout.info website mapping keyboard layouts in Windows, as well as the advanced text rendering engine for .NET Micro Framework. He regularly contributes to the Microsoft's DirectWrite shaping engine.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, UTC Editorial Committee
Dr. Ken Whistler formerly worked at SAP in database software, implementing Unicode in database-related products and prior to that at Metaphor, Inc., where he helped design and implement the Unicode-based internationalization of the Metaphor Data Interpretation Systems. He has a BA in Chinese from Stanford University, 1972 and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He pursued an early career in Sinology, learning both Japanese and Chinese in the course of studying in Japan and in Taiwan. His graduate work focused on the Native American languages of California, including an extended period of field work, archival work, and lexicography. He has developed and marketed text analysis software for linguists.
CTO; Chair, BOD; Chair, CLDR Technical Committee; Cofounder
Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project. He was the president of the Unicode Consortium from its incorporation in 1991 until the end of 2022, and has presided over the board of directors since incorporation. Having held positions at IBM and Apple, Mark joined Google in 2006 where he has been working on software internationalization focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), the software internationalization libraries (including ICU), and stable international identifiers.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair of the Recently Formed Community Engagement
- Vice - Chair, Community Engagement Team
Elango Cheran is the Vice-Chair of the recently formed Community Engagement team and an internationalization engineer at Google. He actively contributes to the ICU and ICU4X projects, and to the MessageFormat Working Group.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair, UTC Editorial Committee
Liang Hai (梁海) has been contributing to the Unicode Standard since 2016. His work focuses on improving both text encoding and font shaping for complexly encoded modern scripts, such as the major Indic ones and Mongolian. As a regular participant in the Script Ad Hoc Group, the Editorial Committee, and the UTC meetings, he is involved in both technical discussions and standard text editing. Since 2021, he has been the Multilingual Font Technologist and the "Unicode guy" at Typotheque.
Job Titles:
- Treasurer
- Vice President of Internationalization
Iris Orriss serves as Vice President of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience Analytics at Meta. She has been with Meta since 2013 and is passionate about eliminating the internet language and cultural barriers and improving the overall user experience. Her work focuses on growing Meta in international markets. From 2012 - 2019 Iris was a member of the board at Translators without Borders, a nonprofit organization that provides vital information in the right language at the right time. Prior to Meta, Iris was a director at Microsoft working on product internationalization and development process in the enterprise and language technology divisions. She is a native of Germany, speaks four languages, and was educated at Freie Universität Berlin.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Chairman, UTC Emoji Subcommittee
- Emoji Subcommittee Chair
Jennifer Daniel is the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee chair. Her first contribution to Unicode was standardizing gender inclusive representations in emoji. As a designer, author and former graphics editor at the New York Times, she now explores communication and messaging through verbal, written, auditory and visual expression at a small ad company called Google. Jennifer is a co-author and illustrator of a number of graphics books including How to Be Human, Space!, and the Origins of Almost Everything. Her work has been recognized by the Walker Art Museum, Society of Illustrators and published in the New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine to name a few. She has had the honor to serve as a judge for the Society of News Design, Online News Association, Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Data is Beautiful and the Art Director's Club. She lives in Berkeley California but also in cyberspace.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, UTC Properties & Algorithms Group
Josh has spent the entirety of his 25+ year career working with fonts, text, tools, processes, and related standards, including Unicode since its early days. He has presented talks and tutorials at several Internationalization & Unicode Conferences about fonts and related topics. He is currently a Senior Computer Scientist at Adobe, where he develops and maintains open source and other font tools.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Chairman of the Unicode Editorial Committee
- Chairman of UTC Editorial Committee
Louka Ménard Blondin serves as the Chair of the Unicode Editorial Committee. His tenure at Synapse Softworks LLC as COO for eight years entailed managing day-to-day operations, recruitment and contracting, intelligence gathering, and business strategy. Prior to his current role, he was the lead engineer and CTO of Aedifice, a vertical SaaS provider in eastern Canada for construction companies, until its acquisition in 2023. Louka joined Unicode in Winter 2023, was appointed to the Editorial Committee in Spring, and became Chair shortly after, where he is currently focused on refining the committee's structure and processes.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Vice - Chair
- Member of the Google
- Technical Vice President
Technical Vice President; Chair, UTC Properties & Algorithms Group; Vice-Chair, UTC Release Management Group; Chair, ICU Technical Committee; ISO 15924 Registrar
Markus Scherer is a member of the Google software internationalization team, focusing on the effective use of Unicode and on the development and deployment of cross-product internationalization libraries. Previously, he was manager, tech lead and software engineer at IBM. He has been a major contributor to ICU since 1999 and designed and developed significant portions of the character conversion, bidi, normalization, Unicode properties, and collation functionality. Markus is an alumnus of the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Chairman, CLDR Person Name Group
- Software Architect and Director of Globalization Engineering at Square ( a Division
Mike is a Software Architect and Director of Globalization Engineering at Square (a division of Block, Inc.) and is responsible for next generation globalization frameworks. Mike has over three decades of internationalization and standards experience and has a background in global user experience design, application design, social games, systems engineering, database internals, and ethnographic research. Before Square, Mike has held globalization leadership positions at PayPal, Zynga, Yahoo! (now OAuth), CommerceOne, and Sybase (now part of SAP), as well as consulting for several Fortune 500 companies. Mike is the chair of the CLDR Person Group subcommittee.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Engineer at Apple
- Vice - Chair, UTC Emoji Subcommittee
Ned Holbrook is a typographic engineer at Apple, specializing in text layout and fonts. He was one of the participants in the industrywide effort to standardize variable font technology in OpenType. He previously worked on wireless networking, virtualization, digital audio, embedded graphics, and remote filesystems.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Technical Vice President Chair, Unicode Technical Committee Chair, UTC Release Management Group
Peter Constable is a Technical Vice President and the Chair of the UTC. Since 2003, Peter has worked for Microsoft on various projects related to Unicode, internationalization, text display and fonts. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008 and later served as Treasurer.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, CLDR Technical Committee
Peter Edberg has worked on internationalization, text and language support at Apple since 1988. He has been Apple's representative to Unicode for many years, and has been actively involved since 2008 with the CLDR and ICU projects. Previously he worked in SRI International's Bioinformation Systems Group and at a startup developing handwriting input systems for Japanese and Chinese. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering Science from Caltech.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, CLDR Person Name Group Vice - Chair, ICU Technical Committee
Rich Gillam has been working on software internationalization for more than 25 years, including stints with IBM, Amazon, and Apple. He's currently a software engineer at Apple, where he works on the internationalization frameworks in macOS and iOS, including ICU, a project he's been associated with off and on since its inception in 1998. He is the author of "Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard" and holds a bachelor's degree in percussion performance from the Eastman School of Music.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Technical Director
- Chairman of Infrastructure Committee
Rick McGowan was appointed Technical Director in July 1992, then Vice President in 1998. He became Technical Vice President in 2011, then VP/IT in 2021. In 2001, he joined Unicode as a senior software engineer and a member of staff. Prior to that Rick was employed by AT&T Unix Pacific, NeXT Software, Inc. and Apple Computer, Inc. Rick has long been an active participant in the Unicode Technical Committee, and participated in the working group prior to the formation of the Consortium.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, UTC Script Ad Hoc Group
Roozbeh Pournader has been working on internationalization, standardization, open source, and digital typography since 1994, when he was in high school. He started his internationalization career by adding Persian support to TeX. While studying Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, he founded and led the FarsiWeb Project that introduced and evangelized internationalization, Unicode, and open source in Iran. At FarsiWeb, Roozbeh led the development of two national standards, on information interchange (ISIRI 6219) and keyboard input (ISIRI 9147), which helped transition Persian users from old character sets to Unicode.
Roozbeh received the Gold Medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 1996, founded the Persian Wikipedia in 2003, and received the Unicode Bulldog Award in 2009 for his contributions to Unicode's support for complex scripts. Since moving to the US, he has worked as an Internationalization Engineer at HighTech Passport, Google (working on Noto, bidi, Android internationalization, and Google Fonts), and Facebook. He has been WhatsApp's Internationalization Lead at Facebook from early 2018.
Roozbeh has been formally representing various organizations to the Unicode Consortium, including High Council of Informatics (2000-2008), HighTech Passport (2009-2011), Google (2011-2018), and Facebook (2018-present). He is also the Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Head of Localization
Salvatore "Salvo" Giammarresi is Head of Localization @ Airbnb. Previously he has held global leadership roles at several technology companies in Silicon Valley including PayPal and Yahoo. Salvo holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Palermo (Italy), where he laterwas a visiting professor, teaching localization.
Salvo is a Board Member @Clear Global (formerly known as Translators without Borders) and an advisor to a few startups.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Senior Software Engineer
- Chairman of ICU4X Technical Committee
Shane Carr is a Senior Software Engineer on Google's i18n Engineering team. He is chair of the ECMA 402 subcommittee for JavaScript i18n standards and is a core contributor to the International Components for Unicode (ICU) project. His work on ICU has focused on locale data, number formatting, and performance optimization.
Shane has previously presented on Zawgyi and on ICU number formatting at the 41st and 42nd Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC). He has also presented at the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He holds an MS and BS in Computer Science and BS in Chemical Engineering summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Vice - Chair
- Chairman of CLDR Digitally Disadvantaged Languages Subcommittee Vice - Chair, Infrastructure Committee
- Owner of Code Hive Tx
Steven R. Loomis is the owner of Code Hive Tx, LLC, a software consultancy focussing on globalization enablement. He was with IBM's corporate globalization group for 22 years where he worked on translation workflow modernization, assisted with the formation of the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project, and served as IBM's Technical Lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C). He continues to work on CLDR's Survey Tool and other tools and processes, work on the updated CLDR Keyboard specification, and work in SIL Keyman to implement the same CLDR specification.
Job Titles:
- Secretary
- Vice President, Globalization at Salesforce
Teresa Marshall is Vice President, Globalization at Salesforce, where she is responsible for product globalization and localization. Over the last 20 years, she has held leadership positions in a number Silicon Valley companies, including at Google. Teresa previously served as an adjunct member of the faculty at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and on the Board of Directors of Women in Localization.
Teresa holds an MA in Translation & Interpretation from Middlebury Institute. An active member of the localization community, she has been the organizer and cohost of the annual Localization Unconference in Silicon Valley since 2009.
Tim has over 19 years of experience in the globalization industry, working in an internationalization capacity for companies like Apple, Vivendi Universal, and most recently Netflix. He has built and lead the internationalization team at Netflix for over 6 years, taking the Netflix product from a US only service to a truly global product available in 190 countries and 27 languages. Much of his work at Netflix has revolved around innovation to support globalization at scale. Tim has a software engineering background, holding a degree in Computer Science.
Toral Cowieson joined Unicode in 2021. More recently, she was the head of strategy and impact measurement at the Internet Society. She also held the leadership and learning portfolio, where her team set the vision and scaled online training and fellowship programs to reach NextGen leaders across 100 countries. Many of these technology and policy professionals are now contributing to the design, standards development, and governance of the core Internet infrastructure around the world.
Toral's prior experience includes leadership roles as a board advisor and across non-profits and corporations, including Thomson Reuters.
Job Titles:
- Vice - Chair
- Vice - Chair, ICU4X Technical Committee
Zibi Braniecki is a Sr. Staff Platform Engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox Platform architecture. In this role Zibi is a peer of the internationalization module at Mozilla, a co-author of the Fluent Localization System and represents Mozilla at TC39 committee focusing on ECMA402.