Presenters:

Ayman is the development manager of the Global Experience Platform team, which is responsible for building the platform that enables Office applications to scale their globalization and localizability support. Prior to GXP, Ayman led and worked in the development teams that enabled several Microsoft products in multiple languages including complex scripts. Joining Microsoft in 1990, his early contributions include adding the first bidi support to Windows 3.1 and WinWord 2.0. Ayman holds a BS in Computer Engineering from University of Arizona.

Adil Allawi has been working in the field of multilingual computing for the past 20 years. He started with writing bilingual software for one of the first implementations of Arabic on a personal computer and has continued into the fields of word-processing, desktop publishing, and text rendering on small devices. Adil largest project was rewriting a high-end DTP application first to handle both Arabic and English and later to work with all international languages. Adil is the Technical Director and lead engineer of Diwan Software Limited.

Deborah Anderson is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. She runs the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley, and is also a Unicode Technical Director. 

Andy Bell works as a program manager at Welocalize, where he has provided strategic and technical guidance to build the company’s largest account over the last 2 years. In addition, he leads Welocalize’s MT program, building operational and technical process, as well as coaching the sales team and external vendors. In an out of the translation world since before email, he also has experience working with text analytics and large text corpora in the field of legal discovery. He believes that as an industry, we will make the fastest progress with MT if we look carefully for ways to share the productivity gains between end-clients, vendors and linguists.

Martin Benjamin is the founder of the Kamusi Project, kamusi.org, a non-profit NGO dedicated to creating free and open learning and reference resources for African languages. His PhD in Anthropology analyzed the relations between international aid and impoverished populations. He has conducted extensive field research in Tanzania on development and health. He began the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary in 1994. Currently he directs the Kamusi Project full time, working on dictionaries for several languages and terminology development for more than a dozen, as well as cutting-edge technological dissemination methods, with the objective of creating PALDO, the Pan-African Living Dictionary Online.

Michael Bridgers is a senior software engineer at SAS Institute. For the past six years, he has been a member of the software globalization division supporting enterprise applications.

Christopher Chapman has written software for everything from chemical plants to cell phones, and now has the good fortune to work at Monotype™ Imaging where he combines his software experience with his interest in writing systems of the world. When he isn't writing software, Christopher enjoys playing music on a variety of musical instruments, especially Renaissance lute and Hindustani bansuri.

Nebojša Ciric is a software engineer at Google. He worked on iGoogle and Google Chrome.

Craig Cummings is an Internationalization Architect at Yahoo! Inc., where he helps set internal standards, participates with the Unicode Consortium, and helps drive corporate technical strategy for internationalization. In past lives, Craig was a key member of Oracle’s Applications Internationalization team. Since J2SE v1.3, Craig has worked closely with Sun’s internationalization team to help shape some of the pluggable locale, resource bundle, font, and supplementary character support in Java.

Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications.

Mark founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of ICU (the premier Unicode software internationalization library), and architected the core of the Java internationalization classes. He also founded and is the chair of the Unicode CLDR project, and is a co-author of BCP 47 "Tags for Identifying Languages" (RFC 4646 and RFC 4646), used for identifying languages in all XML and HTML documents.

Since the start of 2006, Mark has been working on software internationalization at Google, 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.

Jim DeLaHunt is a Vancouver, Canada-based software engineer and consultant in multilingual websites. He helps business reach culturally diverse markets through globalizing technology products. He is an active contributor to the Joomla and Drupal ecosystems, and is a regular Unicode conference participant. He also writes, teaches, and develops software. Earlier, he worked 16 years in Silicon Valley for Adobe Systems. Jim is a licensed pilot, and has sung tenor with Opera San José. 

You can contact Jim at http://jdlh.com/.

Dr. Martin J. Dürst is a Professor in the Department of Integrated Information Technology at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. Martin has been one of the main drivers of internationalization and the use of Unicode in a Web and Internet context. He published the first proposals for domain name Internationalization and composite character normalization, and is the main author of the W3C Character Model and the IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier) specification.  He has also been contributing to the Ruby implementation, mostly in the area of internationalization, since 2007.  Martin teaches in Japanese and English, speaks fluent German, can get around in French, and studied Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Latin.

Mohamed is a software engineer at Google, currently working on internationalization issues. Mohamed graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

John Emmons is vice-chair of Unicode's CLDR technical committee. He has been involved in IBM's globalization activities for the past 21 years and continues to actively contribute to IBM's commitment to software globalization as a member of IBM's ICU development team. He has designed many of the newer functional areas of the CLDR including the metazone model for time zone display and the numbering systems implementation.

Deborah Goldsmith is a Senior Software Engineer at Apple Inc., specializing in international issues, Unicode, and language support. Most recently, she has been focused on the iPhone and iPad. She has also served on the Unicode Technical Committee and as Vice Chair of the Common Locale Data Repository Technical Committee.

As W3C Internationalization Activity Lead, Richard Ishida is striving to make the World Wide Web world wide. The Internationalization Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to help ensure universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture. Richard has also increased internationalization-related education and outreach while at the W3C. He is on the Unicode Conference board, and the Unicode Editorial Committee. He is the coordinator for the MultilingualWeb network, a European Commission funded project reviewing standards and best practices enabling multilingual use of the Web.

Martin Jansche is a software engineer at Google Inc. As part of the speech research group, he works primarily on internationalization of speech technology.

Savithri Jasti is a senior software engineer at Yahoo! Inc. As a member of Yahoo's Internationalization team, she is responsible for tools and infrastructure libraries. Prior to Yahoo, she worked on database security features at Oracle.

Shaopeng Jia
Software Engineer, Google Inc.

Shaopeng is currently a software engineer at Google working for the internationalization team. He has over 3.5 years of experience working with international phone numbers and has researched phone number plans from over 200 countries/regions in the world. Based on this work he has designed and co-implemented libraries across different languages built on top of this. He has also had hands-on experience working closely with Android, Google Voice, and Google High-end Mobile Click-to-Call to improve international phone number handling across Google.

Arthur Jin has 21 years of experience designing software for global use, including fourteen years at Microsoft as an international program manager. In the last four years, Arthur has been playing an internationalization architecting role for the Microsoft online services including Windows Live. Much of his work has been adopted in product designs. Arthur is widely regarded as a globalization "go to" person in Windows Live product team.

Michael Kaplan is a program manager at Microsoft, working on identifying and closing gaps in globalization support throughout the company. He previously worked in both Windows and the .NET Framework, centering on Collation, Keyboards, and Locales. He was the principal developer for both the MS Layer for Unicode on Win9x (MSLU) and the MS Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). He has written dozens of articles on international development issues and is the author of the book "Internationalization with Visual Basic" from Sams Publishing. Prior to joining Microsoft, he did consulting as the Chief Software Architect of Trigeminal Software. His blog gets new posts daily and can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap.

Bio is coming soon...

E.I. Kolehmainen, a citizen and resident of Finland, has an international technical, marketing and product management background in the IT industry since the 60's. More recently, he has been involved in various standards activities at the national, European, and global levels. At CEN he is currently active in the Cultural Diversity Focus Group and in TC304, European Localization Requirements. At Unicode he is involved in the CLDR TC, and at JTC1 he has most recently been involved in SC2/WG2.

Aharon Lanin is a software engineer at Google and leads a team that promotes bidirectional language support in Google products. The team has added bidi capabilities to various platforms, APIs, and products, and helps other teams with bidi infrastructure, consulting, and documentation.

Norbert Lindenberg is an internationalization architect at Yahoo!. He studied computer science at Universität Karlsruhe and internationalization at Apple Computer, and then led internationalization projects at General Magic and Sun Microsystems.

Steven R. Loomis is a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San Jose, where he is the Technical Lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C). His ICU contributions include the Locale Explorer demo and the CLDR Survey Tool. After discovering the world of internationalization during a temporary assignment to a bidirectional text project, he joined the ICU team in 1998. His hobbies include Maltese language advocacy.

Dr. Ken Lunde has worked for Adobe Systems for over 19 years, and is a Senior Computer Scientist in CJKV Type Development. He is also the author of "CJKV Information Processing" Second Edition (O'Reilly Media, 2009).

Michael Manca was born in Portland, raised in southern Italy around the city of Lecce, and moved back to Oregon in '97 to complete his higher education studies (International Business and Marketing). He spent most of his professional career at Intel, approximately 5 years, as a Solution Quality Analyst for the localization of server management software products. In recent times, he transitioned to localization Project Manager and Translation Lead roles, still focusing on some of the more technical aspects of the localization process.

Michael is a specialist in globalization of applications and distributed systems with over two decades of internationalization experience. He is a licensed professional engineer with extensive experience consulting or leading globalization projects for a number Fortune 500 companies and has a background in global e-commerce, application design, database internals, distributed bibliographic systems, test engineering, and ethnographic research. He is currently leading the I18n Architecture team at Yahoo! Inc.

Mihai Nita has been working in the localization/internationalization field for 13 years now, and still learning. Nita tries to cover internationalization not only for C/C++ and Windows, but also for Java, C#, Mac OS, Linux/UNIX, web technologies, client/server, the life, the universe and everything.

As part of a small localization company in Silicon Valley, he has completed i18n/l10n projects, large and small, for well known or less known companies. He has written numerous guides for internal use or for customers, covering best practice for internationalization and localization, development, building, single sourcing, and testing. He held presentations and classes on Java and XML internationalization, Web technologies internationalization, and single sourcing.

Now he is doing more of the same at Adobe Systems, Inc. He spends most of his free time divided between various i18n newsgroups and learning more about his other passions: C++, system internals, security.

Kat is currently a Staff Test Engineer at Google. He joined Netscape in 1996, where he initially worked as I18n Evangelist, then as Principal I18n Software QA Engineer and as Mozilla Technology Evangelist. Since joining Google in 2005, he has been working as an I18n Consultant and a Test Engineer for a variety of web applications. He has presented papers at W3C and Unicode Conferences as well as other Industry conferences in Japan and the US.

Addison Phillips is the Globalization Architect for Lab126, creator of the Amazon Kindle e-book. He is the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group, a member of the Unicode Editorial Committee, and co-editor of IETF BCP 47.

Lara also works for the internationalisation team at Google. She co-implemented the phone number libraries with Shaopeng, spending a lot of time writing metadata and tests for different regions around the world. She is also responsible for formatting addresses at Google.

Craig Rublee has been working at Adobe Systems, Inc. for 20 years. During his tenure there he has been involved in the development of technologies to extend the reach of Adobe's products to international markets. In his current role as Sr. Globalization Architect, his responsibilities include promoting software internationalization across Adobe's products. Craig has a BS in Mathematical Sciences and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. 

Matt Sanford is the lead engineer of Twitter's International team, where his responsibilities are in both engineering and international strategy. Matt handles issues ranging from writing code for Twitter's community translation tools to troubleshooting exotic character encoding issues. Matt previously worked for Summize, the creators of Twitter Search, and prior to that Disney and AOL.

Murray is a Partner Software Design Engineer at Microsoft, working mostly on the RichEdit editing engine and math editing and display in MS Office. He completed BS, MS, and PhD degrees in theoretical physics at Yale University and worked for 22 years in the theory & application of lasers, first at Bell Labs and then as a Professor at the University of Arizona. He also worked on technical word processing, writing the first math display program SCROLL (1969) and later (1980s) the PS technical word processor. More info is given in his blog on Math in Office blogs.msdn.com/murrays. 

Sumit Sarkar has been working on internationalization and localization data access issues using DataDirect products for 8 years. His focus is on i18n and performance of the data access layer for which he has developed a patent pending technology for its analysis. DataDirect products connect applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standard-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. 96 of the Fortune 100 turn to DataDirect for their data access needs. Sumit holds a B.S. in Computer Science from N.C. State University.

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 for ten years 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.

Jungshik Shin is a software engineer at Google. He worked on i18n of Mozilla Firefox in the past and currently works on i18n of Google Chrome.

Dick Sites is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, where he has worked for 6 years. He previously worked at Adobe Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Burroughs, IBM, and taught at UC/San Diego. His is co-architect of the DEC Alpha computers. Most recently he has been working on Unicode text processing and on CPU and network performance analysis.

Dr. Sites holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford and a BS degree in Mathematics from MIT. He holds 34 patents and was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Guy is an MVP in ASP.NET and the author of ".NET Internationalization" published by Addison-Wesley (http://www.dotneti18n.com). He is a Microsoft Certified Professional developer, author, trainer and speaker, has spoken at many European and US conferences and is an INETA Speaker.

He runs The .NET Developer Network (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com), a free .NET user group in the South West of England. He co-organises DDD South West (http://www.dddsouthwest.com), a free one day technical event in the South West of England. He has written over 50 articles for numerous magazines and has co-authored an application development book. You can read his blog at http://www.guysmithferrier.com and reach him on Twitter @GuySmithFerrier.

Mohamed is a Software Engineer who joined Google in December 2008. He worked on products that are related to regional markets like Google transliteration service and Voice Search. Mohamed holds a Master degree in Computer Engineering from the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Egypt.

Bio is coming soon...

Bio is coming soon...

Tex Texin has been providing globalization services including architecture, strategy, training, and implementation to the software industry for many years. Tex has created numerous globalize products, managed internationalization development teams, developed internationalization and localization tools, and guided companies in taking business to new regional markets. Tex is also an advocate for internationalization standards in software and on the Web. He is a representative to the Unicode Consortium and the World Wide Web Consortium. Tex maintains two Web sites for internationalization, the popular www.I18nGuy.com and www.XenCraft.com.

Yoshito Umaoka is a software engineer at IBM, where he has worked on globalization issues in various software products including Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal Server. He currently works for ICU project as the project lead of ICU4J.

Kirti Velankar is a senior software engineer at Yahoo Inc. She is a part of the internationalization engineering group working on the internationalization libraries , backend platform work on worldwide Yahoo products and has contributed to the PHP 5 development with open source project with Zend Technologies. She has extensive experience in Object Oriented design and development in Java/J2EE. Prior to Yahoo, she was at Sun Microsystems, Inc.  

Loïc Dufresne de Virel is currently a localization strategist within Intel's in-house localization team. His main activities include overseeing the use of Intel's translation management system, constantly advocating for proper and improved internationalization and localization practices and processes for web, software and "print" collateral, as well as managing most localization projects for Intel Digital Health Group. Prior to moving to Oregon and joining Intel, where he has been involved in localization for the past ten years, Loïc spent a few years in Costa Rica, working as a regional technical adviser for the UNCTAD

Ram has been an internationalization industry insider for over a decade. He is currently the Internationalization Architect at Yahoo! focusing on globalization issues encountered by complex websites. His projects include architecture, design and implementation of in-context translation platform and global domain name and URL strategy, design and implementation. Prior to Yahoo! he was a member of the ICU team and the CLDR Technical Committee.

Laura Welcher is a linguist with research interests in endangered language documentation, description and revitalization, as well as the growing subdiscipline of computer-assisted linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she learned first hand the importance of creating digital language resources that last in her field research on Potawatomi (a critically endangered North American language) and in her work as an archivist with the Survey for California and Other Indian Languages. She worked with the E-MELD project in developing FIELD, an ontology-based lexical database, and building Potawatomi resources for the School of Best Practice. Since then she has become involved with various projects in linguistics that are working towards developing standards for the creation and archiving of digital language resources and interoperable tools to support linguistic research, including the Open Language Archives Community, LINGUIST List, and the GOLD Markup Ontology.

John Yunker is co-founder of Byte Level Research, a web globalization research firm. He has authored a number of landmark reports, including The Web Globalization Report Card and The Art of the Global Gateway. And he authored the first book devoted to the emerging field of Web globalization, Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies. He writes the popular blog Global by Design (www.globalbydesign.com).