Keynote Speaker:

Laura Welcher

Director of Operations and The Rosetta Project

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.

Speakers:

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's 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.

Last 3 speaking engagements:

IUC 32 - I18n in Google Web Toolkit - An Open Source Collaboration
IUC 33 - Mashing-up Bi-Di
IUC 34 - Developing a Unicode font for the desktop, the mobile and the web

Participated in "Internationalization assessments" panel at Worldware 2011 with Leandro/Mike.

Roy is a full blood citizen of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, OK. He is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, and digital media specialist. He holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Oklahoma State University and an MA in Studio Art from the University of Arkansas - Little Rock where he was a research fellow at the Sequoyah Research Center. He has been adjunct instructor of Multimedia Design at Northeastern State University and Cherokee language animation instructor for the American Indian Resource Center. He currently works in the Language Technology program for Cherokee Nation Education Services Group.

Boney and Erb's last 3 Speaking Engagements:

Oklahoma Native American Students in Higher Education - Tahlequah, OK 2.18.2011
"Using Technology in a Cherokee Way"

Microsoft Research - Redmond, WA, 2.10.2011
"Using Technology in a Cherokee Way"

Indigenous Language Institute - Albuquerque, NM, 10.12.2010
"Using Technology in a Cherokee Way"

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

Majid Bastani is a member of Software Globalization division at SAS Institute, Inc. He has been actively working on various internationalization issues including BiDi with different teams within the organization. He strives to make BiDi support more accessible and understandable by preparing numerous training materials on this topic.

Helena Shih Chapman is responsible for every single line of code with regards to multicultural and localization support at IBM. In addition to her short stint managing the worldwide market intelligence operation and an internal open source bazaar for IBM's software division, she also has a deep development background with hands-on development experiences of the ICU. Before joining IBM, She worked at Taligent, Dataware, and Apple. She holds a MSc. degree in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts.

Since 1984, started assisting to R&D of Chinese processing technique.
As one of key engineers, attended the development of on-line handwriting recognition, OCR, Q_Pen and other tools for large-scale Chinese dictionary and ancient classics digitization.
Since 2005, responsible for marketing and sales of UniHan products as COO.

Peter Constable is an active member of the Unicode Technical Committee and is also a Technical Director of the Unicode Consortium. He was the project editor for ISO 639-3, which is the basis for language coding on the Internet and in most modern platforms. He has an MA in Linguistics and worked with SIL International for many years prior to 2003 as a linguistic researcher and language technologist. Since 2003, he has worked at Microsoft on globalization technologies. He is currently a Senior Program Manager responsible for globalization infrastructure in Microsoft Windows.

Craig Cummings is a Globalization Architect at Yahoo! Inc., where he helps set internal standards, participates as a representative to the Unicode Consortium, and helps drive corporate technical strategy for internationalization. His current responsibilities include setting strategy and guidelines for bidirectional software in Middle East markets and global search technologies. In past lives, Craig was a key member of Oracle's Applications Internationalization team where Craig worked closely with Sun's internationalization team to 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.

Peter Edberg

Senior Software Engineer, Apple Inc.

Peter Edberg has worked on text, internationalization and language support at Apple for 22 years, from locations in Cupertino, France, China, and Oregon. He is currently Apple's representative to Unicode, and actively involved in CLDR and ICU. Previously he worked in SRI International's Bioinformation Systems Group and in a startup developing handwriting input systems for Japanese and Chinese.

Jeff Edwards

Language Technologist, Cherokee Nation

Joseph Erb (Cherokee) is an award winning artist, filmmaker, and digital media specialist. He received his BFA in art from Oklahoma City University. He produced a short animated film based on a traditional Cherokee story in the Cherokee language as his MFA thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation there, Erb returned home to Oklahoma, where he continues to combine his interests: art, traditional storytelling, language preservation, and the teaching of children. His Muscogee Creek and Cherokee students have produced native language animations, learning both new technology and their own traditional culture. Currently, he works as an educational digital media specialist for the Language Technology Program at Cherokee Nation Education ServicesGroup in Tahlequah, OK.

Boney and Erb's last 3 Speaking Engagements:

Oklahoma Native American Students in Higher Education - Tahlequah, OK 2.18.2011
"Using Technology in a Cherokee Way"

Microsoft Research - Redmond, WA, 2.10.2011
"Using Technology in a Cherokee Way"

Indigenous Language Institute - Albuquerque, NM, 10.12.2010
"Using Technology in a Cherokee Way"

Behnam Esfahbod began his software development and internationalization career at Computing Center, Sharif University of Technology in 2002. Growing up in printing industry business and experienced with desktop publishing systems, he got involved in the issues regarding Perso-Arabic Script in various computer platforms, mostly open-source projects, specifically GNOME Desktop and Mozilla.

Working with FarsiWeb Project, he participated in the development of two Iranian national standards: Unicode-based data storage and interchange standard, and Iranian Persian keyboard layout standard. He also participated as a font designer and developer on the national project to create the first set of standard-based Persian True-Type fonts.

From 2006 to 2010 he worked with IRNIC, the ccTLD Registry of Iran, on the domain registration system, Whois and EPP services, and participated in ASIWG, the Arabic-Script Internationalized Domain Names Working Group.

As of 2011 he works as an Internationalization Consultant, has joined the ICANN At-Large community and is following up the issues of Perso-Arabic script in domain names through ICANN IDN Working Groups.

Doug Felt has been working in the Internationalization Team at Google for the past five years. Doug was a member of the group that designed and implemented the locale enhancement features in JDK 7. Prior to joining Google, he worked at IBM where he was project lead for ICU4J. During his time at IBM he also worked with the (then) Sun Java2D team to provide complex text layout (Arabic, Hindi, Thai) support in the JDK.

Andrew Glass is a program manager in the Windows division at Microsoft. He works on globalization infrastructure and font shaping (Uniscribe). He has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington, Department of Asian Languages and Literature. He has authored Unicode proposals for the Kharo??h? and Br?hm? scripts together with Stefan Baums. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008 he taught at University of Washington, University of Leiden, and Bukky? University in Japan.

Stuart Gill is a Member of Technical Staff on the Google internationalization team where he works on ICU and fonts and text layout. He has been involved in various areas of internationalization work for the last 20 years. Stuart is an alumnus of the University of Waterloo, Canada.

John Hudson is a type designer and font developer specialising in custom font solutions for multilingual computing and publishing. He is co-founder of Tiro Typeworks, British Columbia.

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.

Nav Jagpal went to school at the University of Victoria and started at Google in 2007. He is currently a software engineer in the Anti-Malware security team.

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

Shaopeng Jia 
Software Engineer, Google Inc.

Shaopeng is currently a software engineer at Google working for the internationalization team. He has over 4.5 years of experience working with international phone numbers. He has also had hands-on experience working closely with Android, Google Voice, and Google AdsMobile Click-to-Call to improve international phone number handling across Google.

Cibu Johny is a software engineer in Google Inc. He has been working on the i18n libraries for the last 4 years. He developed various features of Google's virtual keyboard web API. He also worked with UTC on specific areas of Unicode encoding of Malayalam and developed a popular transliteration scheme for that language.

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. 

Michael Kuperstein is a 15 year veteran of software engineering at Intel, with 10 solid years of experience working on a wide variety of software localization projects. He wears many hats as a localization engineer, internationalization software architect, application developer, tool wrangler, speaker / presenter, and all around go-to guy for software internationalization.

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.

Su Liu

AIX Globalization Architect, IBM

Su Liu is a Globalization Architect for AIX, an UNIX on IBM Power System. His major areas of expertise are in code set conversion, ideographic language input and output, and complex text layout. Currently, he is focusing on enhancement of architectural foundation on UNIX globalization with Unicode technology.

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 specific development projects since joining this team in 1998 include the ICU Locale Explorer demo and the CLDR Survey Tool. He has most recently spoken at the International Mac Users Group (IMUG) in 2010, and Unicode Conferences for the past decade. His hobbies include Maltese language advocacy.

Dr. Ken Lunde has worked at Adobe Systems for over twenty years, and is a Senior Computer Scientist specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he develops East Asian fonts, along with the specifications on which they are based. He is also the author of "CJKV Information Processing" Second Edition, which was published by O'Reilly Media at the end of 2008.

My last three speaking engagements were IUC34 (10/2010), IMUG (09/2010), and "Frontiers of CJKV Information Processing" at Nagaoka University (06/2010).

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, global product management, and ethnographic research. He is currently in a leadership position with the Globalization Architecture team at Yahoo! Inc.

Thomas Milo

Partner, DecoType

Thomas Milo is partner in DecoType, a team that has been working on Arabic script technology since 1982, in the course of which they pioneered the concept of Dynamic Font (Smart Font, Intelligent Font). Tom has contributed to Unicode since 1988 and licensed fonts and their ACE font layout engine various companies (e.g., to Microsoft as OLE server, creating the first smart font on the Windows platform). The most comprehensive implementation of DecoType concepts to date is WinSoft's Tasmeem, a plug-in that turns InDesign in a veritable Arabic typesetting system. Besides, He is among others consultant for Basis Technology in Cambridge, MA, for their Arabic and Persian Technology projects. He was given the honour three times of presenting the Keynote Address (IUC14 hosted IUC16 in Amsterdam. In 2009 Tom received on behalf of DecoType the Dr Peter Karow Award in recognition got his fundamental contribution for computer typography. He also holds a Unicode Bulldog Award - whenever he remembers where he put it.

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.

Shunsuke Oshima is a master course student in the Intelligence and Information Course, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Aoyama Gakuin University. His research interests include Bidi, XML, HTML, JavaScript, Security, and Education with IT.

Anshuman Pandey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on political aspects of language in South Asia and the emergence of regional linguistic nationalism in the region. He is a specialist of South Asian writing systems and has authored several proposals for encoding historical and indigenous scripts in the Unicode standard.
Anshuman abandoned a successful career in IT to pursue his dream of teaching and researching South Asia, and has never looked back.

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.

Roozbeh has been working on software bidirectionalization since 1996, when he was in high school. As a native speaker of Persian, he has had ample opportunity to experience the challenges of bidirectionalization firsthand. He has contributed to various internationalization-related standards, is a member of the Unicode Technical Committee, and a recipient of the Unicode Bulldog Award. He is also an advocate for free software and a long-time contributor to internationalization support in open source software.

Presently, Roozbeh is a Software Engineer working at Google's internationalization team.

Martin Raymond, from Macclesfield, England, worked in commercial IT for 25 years before joining SIL's Non-Roman Script Initiative team (NRSI) in 2007. Most of his work for the NRSI has been as a PHP programmer on the ScriptSource project, with particular responsibility for security and user information management. He now serves as a content editor and site administrator for ScriptSource and helps to coordinate SIL's contributions to the CLDR.

Leandro Reis (Adobe Systems Incorporated) has held engineering and program management roles with the Adobe globalization team since 1996, although his introduction to the world of globalization happened in 1991 at Microsoft (Redmond). He currently manages Adobe's World-Readiness program, whose goal is to elevate the level of internationalization of Adobe's products by coordinating the contributions of 80+ localization project managers, localization engineers, localization QE, globalization architects and globalization product managers to deliver internationalization assessments (globalization report cards), recommendations for improvement, educational materials and consultation to Adobe's product teams. He recently launched the team's first blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/globalization) in multiple languages. For a good part of the last decade, he has led the localization engineering teams working on the Creative Suite, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere projects. He holds a B.S. in computer science from San Jose State and is a certified project manager by Stanford University.

Pim Rietbroek is in charge of implementing Unicode standardisation and script and language support for the Dutch academic publisher Brill, who recently celebrated their 325th anniversary.. 

Dr. Norbert Runge studied computer science at the universities of Darmstadt and Karlsruhe in Germany and received a Ph.D. degree in Karlsruhe in 1993.

From 1993 to 2005 he worked at IBM. In 2006, he joined Google and is currently a member of the International Engineering Department at Google.

Joel Sahleen is the lead software developer for internationalization and localization at Adobe Systems' Omniture Business Unit. Prior to joining Adobe, he worked as a freelance PHP web developer, and taught early Chinese history, language, and philosophy at Stanford University.

Murray is a Partner Software Design Engineer at Microsoft, working mostly on the RichEdit editing engine and math editing and display in Office. He completed BS, MS, and PhD degrees in theoretical physics at Yale University and worked for 25 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. 

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.

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.

Andy is currently a software engineer at Google working for the internationalization team. His focus is on structured data, and infrastructure.

Senior Program Manager within the Microsoft Office organization responsible for text and font infrastructure, including the RichEdit component. Previous experience includes work on the Word Web App v1, several versions of Microsoft Word (including the Word 2007 UI and depth features such as styles and lists), and OneNote v1. He is the author of numerous mass-market computer books. His area of interests include user behaviors and features relating to working with multiple scripts and OpenType functionality. His most recent speaking engagements have been with the Microsoft MVP program.

Originally from San Francisco, CA, Luke Swartz has a BS in Symbolic Systems and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He served as a nuclear submariner in the US Navy, as a divisional and project manager both on a submarine (USS Ohio) and shore command (Commander of Submarines, Europe and Africa). Since 2010, he has been a Product Manager for Google's Internationalization team.

Andrew joined Google in 2005 and is currently the technical program manager. Andrew holds a masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Victoria as well as professional certifications from Stanford University, and he is currently pursuing a masters degree in engineering management from Drexel.

Dr. Yahya Tabesh is a faculty member of Computer Science at Sharif University of Technology, former chairman of department of Mathematical Sciences, former director of Computing Center at Sharif University, and used to be a member of the Iranian High Council of Informatics for 9 years. Persian standards of Unicode and standard of layout for Persian keyboard developed under his supervision. As chairman of FarsiWeb, he supported development of Sharif Linux (a Persian distribution of Linux) and recently he supervised developing Persian Android solution for mobiles.

Tak Takahashi joined Teradata in 1989 and has been involved in various application development and its internationalization and localization, including Value Analyzer and Teradata CRM as a globalization specialist. He holds a degree in Architectural Engineering. 

John is software engineer at Google, working primarily on Google Web Toolkit. He has primarily worked on i18n, DevMode, JRE emulation, and WebSockets.

Tex Texin has been providing globalization services including architecture, strategy, training, and implementation to the software industry for many years. Tex has created numerous global products, built internationalization development teams, designed best practices, 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 on the steering committees for open source software. Tex is the owner/author of the popular www.I18nGuy.com.

Loïc Dufresne de Virel is currently a localization strategist within Intel's in-house localization team. In this role, his main activities include overseeing the use of Intel's translation management system and deployment of other localization tools, constantly advocating for proper and improved internationalization and localization practices and processes for web, software and "print" collateral, as well as defining the training roadmap for localization and internationalization. Prior to moving to Oregon and joining Intel, where he has been involved in localization for the past 12 years, Loïc spent a few years in Costa Rica, working as a regional technical adviser for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Recent speaking engagement:

IUC 34
SW Professional Conference (Intel event)
Intel IT Leadership Conference
Worldware

1988-2004, played as the Secretary General of ACCC (Association for Common Chinese Code, International), CJK-JRG Convenor and Chief Editor, and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 IRG Rapportuer, lead the CJK Ideographs unification. and the standard development.

Since 1995,he has been devoted to electronic publication of Chinese large scale classics, as Chief Engineer and Superviser, successifuly accomplished e-SiKuQuanShu (which is invisted by DH-HK) and e-SiBuCongKan, which are regarded as the biggest Chinese ancient classics in the world.

Since 2000, he established Beijing UniHan Digital Technoly Co., Ltd, continued to focus on Chinese information processing technuque development, tools and content providing on web and mobile.

In 1998, I egaged at IUC and gave a speech on large scale Chinese classics digitatization.

1978-1981 Master of Engineering, Computer Department, Tsinghua University
1961-1966 Bachelor, Automation Department, Tsinghua University

More Information: http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg