Presenters' Biographies 

Nicholas is founder and Chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit Association. He is currently on leave from MIT, where he was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology. A graduate of MIT, Nicholas was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. Conceived in 1980, the Media Laboratory opened its doors in 1985. He is also author of the 1995 best seller, “Being Digital,” which has been translated into more than 40 languages. In the private sector, Nicholas serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc. and as general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies, including Wired magazine.

Dr. Deborah Anderson is a researcher in the Dept. of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and runs the UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative (and its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project). She is the UC Berkeley representative to the Unicode Consortium, and serves as Liaison for the Linguistic Society of America. Having received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies, she also edits the UCLA Indo-European Studies Bulletin, and promotes the use of Unicode generally.

Andy Abbar
Director, International Strategic Initiatives, Microsoft Corporation

Andy joined Microsoft in 1992 to work on the first Bidirectional products (Arabic and Hebrew)and for the past 14 years has been working in the internationalization and localization of MS products. For the past 3 years, his focus has been on reaching out to languages that have been under served with technolgoy and providing a global and scalable approach to software localization.

Michael Alford is a Senior Architect for Travelport’s online travel platform, a platform that will serve millions of global customers every year on such brands as Orbitz, Cheaptickets, Ebookers, Octopus, Gullivers, and a number of white-label customers. He is technical lead for both internationalization and general web architecture of the new generation of the platform. He has been working with Java and e-commerce since 1997 and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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.

Soeren Bendtsen has worked for many years at IBM in various fields related to localization and development. He started to work for IBM Denmark as a translator, translation tester and localization project planner. Later he switched to working with development in the Lotus Notes and Domino area, and is a certified Lotus Application Developer. A couple of years ago he came back to the language world and has since then worked as a localization planner and localization tools architect for a large Siebel based CRM application used in house and with IBM business partners. Soeren holds a Masters degree in English from the Copenhagen Business School.

Pierre Cadieux is President of i18N Inc. (www.i18n.ca), a firm specializing in internationalization training and consulting for software, websites and embedded systems. Pierre also teaches internationalization at University of Montréal. Formerly VP Technology at Alis Technologies, he pioneered the transparent handling of Arabic and created the core bi-directional technology licensed by Microsoft. As Director of Localization Technology at Bowne Global Solutions, he carried out research and analysis on multilingual Web sites and published the first generic model of Globalization Management Systems. He can be reached at pcadieux@i18n.ca.

Kuang-Hui Chiu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business Administration at National Taipei University (NTPU), Taiwan, R.O.C.  He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU), Taiwan, R.O.C. in 1987.  Prof. Chiu is well known in the area of eBusiness and Information Management.

Craig Cummings is a Principal Technical Staff 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.

Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications, including such areas as bi-directional text, normalization, scripts, text segmentation, identifiers (including IDN), collation, regular expressions, compression, locale data, character conversion, character properties, and security.

Mark was responsible for the overall architecture of ICU (the premier Unicode software library), and the earlier version of ICU that was incorporated into the standard Java release.

Dr. Jennifer DeCamp is the Foreign Language Technology Manager and head of the Foreign Language Technology Center of Expertise for a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (non-profit) within MITRE Corporation. She works as a liaison between the U.S. Government, standards organizations, academia, and industry and is involved in a wide range of standards efforts. Jennifer has worked in the internationalization field since 1974. She also taught a graduate course at American University on "Designing Systems for Global Users" for seven years. 

Christian began his career in software development in Austria more than 20 years ago. Since then, he has been developing systems for the banking and insurance industries and spent 6 years in Web Consulting as a technical project lead. He recently returned to the insurance industry and manages development for the web, middleware, and document generation systems for Aviva Life Insurance Company in the US. In his spare time, Christian writes and speaks about generic solutions to specific software development problems, such as content localization. If there is still time left, he blogs at http://cdonner.com.

John Fay spearheaded development of Zebra’s Global Printing Solution. By embedding support for Unicode encoded data into its printers, Zebra’s customers can seamlessly output any language(s) from their business applications without the need for special drivers.  Mr. Fay has been with Zebra Technologies Corporation for 2 years. His first project at Zebra was the i18n project adding extensive Unicode support to Zebra’s high-end printers.

Elsebeth Flarup has worked with software localization in IBM for 17 years, the last 8 years as localization project manager and globalization architect in the Software Group and Sales & Distribution units in Raleigh, NC.  During this time she has led the localization of a number of software products with simultaneous shipment of up to 17 language versions.  Prior to this, she held positions as senior translator, terminology manager and localization project manager in IBM Denmark. Elsebeth holds a Masters degree in History and English from the University of Copenhagen.

Asmus Freytag, Ph.D. is president of ASMUS, Inc., a Seattle-based company specializing in consulting services and seminars on topics ranging from software internationalization to implementing Unicode.  He has been a contributor to the Unicode Standard since before the inception of the Unicode Consortium and a co-author of the Unicode Standard for many years.  He has written or contributed to several Unicode Technical Reports and Standards.  He is a vice-president of the Unicode Consortium and represents the Consortium in several standards groups such as NCITS/L2 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.

Mark Garrett is a support developer with ModernGigabyte LLC in Louisville, KY.  In addition to QA and general bug squashing, Mark is otherwise known as the company "locale guy."  He has been writing HTML since the time when multiple title and body tags were the "it" thing and has become moderately good at PHP scripting in the last five or so years.  He currently lives in Louisville with his beautiful, talented wife.

Since the 1990s, Evan Gerber has created innovative solutions for unique business problems through technology. With a background in ethnology, information architecture, content management, and client side design and development, he specializes in conceiving and creating organized, cogent, and intuitive web applications.  Evan has worked at Molecular on a number of large-scale content management, e-commerce, and internationalization projects.  In his current role, Evan utilizes his expertise in internationalization and localization, as well as architecting front-end user interfaces and content management solutions for corporate, external and internal web sites, integrating content and technology, and designing business processes.

David Germano is an Associate Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia. He received his doctorate in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1998, he began an initiative to create a repository of digital resources for Tibetan Studies that has over time developed into the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (THDL). He is co-editor of and a contributor to the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies. His main research interest is in the Buddhist and Bön traditions of the 10th through 14th centuries, situated in their historical context.

Richard Gillam is the author of "Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard," a well-regarded and comprehensive introduction to Unicode for programmers, a longtime tutorial presenter at the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences, and one of the original developers of the open-source International Components for Unicode internationalization library. He is currently a senior developer in IBM's DB2 Entity Analytics Solutions group, where he works on technologies for matching and analyzing personal and business names.

Bill Hall has been a developer and consultant on Windows and .NET platforms with experience going back to Windows 1.0, which he ported at the systems level to AT&T/Olivetti computers. An applications programmer throughout his computing career, he turned to internationalization in the early 1990’s taking several projects into European and Far East languages and contributing numerous articles to Microsoft Systems Journal and Multilingual Computing.  In past lives, Bill has been a military and civilian aviator, an associate professor of mathematics for nearly 20 years, and served three years as an associate editor at Mathematical Reviews.

John Harvey is a senior engineer in the OS Engineering Asia group at Apple. He has experience with development of a wide variety of technologies and has been the key contributor to a number of system components to support internationalization, notably the Text Services Manager and the Multilingual Text Editor.

Charles Hornig is the Globalization Architect for IBM's Rational software division. With a degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has more than twenty-five years of experience building software, including everything from operating systems to testing tools.

C. C. Hsu is a standard and business planner within the Development Department at IBM Taiwan Corporation, and is committee member of the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and I nspection in Taiwan. She has worked at IBM Taiwan since 1993 on Chinese operating systems, fonts, input method and natural language system support.

Richard Ishida is the W3C Internationalization Activity Lead. This activity has the mission of ensuring universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture, by proposing & coordinating any techniques, conventions, guidelines and activities within the W3C that help to make and keep the Web international. Richard is also chair of the GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group.  For many years Richard's seminars and consulting have helped product groups around the world develop websites, documents, software, and on-screen information so that it can be easily localized for the international marketplace. His background includes translation and interpreting, computational linguistics, and translation tools. He has studied French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

Waris is a Ph.D. student in multilingual software engineering at the University of Paris VIII. His main research interests include Data Mining, Search Engine, Software Internationalization, Unicode and Open Source Uyghur Software development.  He is also one of the key founders of a non-profit association, Uyghur Computer Science Association (www.ukij.org).

Michael Kaplan is a Technical Lead at Microsoft, working on 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. He has also spoken at conferences around the world. Prior to joining Microsoft, he did consulting as the Chief Software Architect of Trigeminal Software, Inc. His blog gets new posts daily and can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap. 

E.I. Kolehmainen 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 European and global levels as the coordinator of the Finnish national initiative “Kotoistus” sponsored by the Ministry of Education.

Su Liu, advisory software engineer, is working on globalization enablement for IBM's AIX operating system. His major areas of expertise are in national language support, input methods, and complex text layout technologies.

Steven R. Loomis is a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San Jose. His ICU contributions include the Locale Explorer demo. Steven joined Taligent in 1993, and has worked on networking, messaging and Web server frameworks. After discovering the world of internationalization during a temporary assignment to a bidirectional text project, he joined the International Components for Unicode team. His hobbies include Linux system administration and Maltese language advocacy.

Gwyneth Marshall is an International Program Manager for the Office Server team. She designs features for the international user and is an advocate to the development teams for international customers, letting the teams know what Microsoft's customers' international issues and needs are. In addition, she has worked on the IIS, COM+, and MSN teams as an International Program Manager and was a contributor to Microsoft's book, "Developing International Software - 2nd. Edition." 

Marin Millar is the Globalization Manager for the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation. Her team is responsible for the globalization of Visual Studio, which spans all of the programming languages produced at Microsoft and the .NET Framework.

Thomas Milo is the president of DecoType and has been working on Arabic script technology since 1982, in the course of which pioneered the concept of Dynamic Font (Smart Font, Intelligent Font).  DecoType has a close partnership with WinSoft, France.  Tom served as a captain in the Royal Netherlands Army and did two tours of duty as an Arabic speaking officer in the United Nations Interim Force in South Lebanon as a member of a contingent of armoured infantry on peacekeeping duty. At the behest of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence, he wrote the Handbook of Lebanese Spoken Arabic for the Royal Netherlands Army (1981).  Tom acts as a consultant for Basis Technology in Cambridge, MA, contributing to their Arabic and Persian Technology projects.  Tom holds a Unicode Bulldog Award – whenever he remembers where he put it.

Professor Leonard C. Muellner was the chair of Classical Studies from 1978-1981 and again from 1993-2003. He has a master's degree in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University. His principal areas of research are ancient Greek language, mythology, and poetics, but he also works in Latin literature and Roman mythology with equal passion.  He sits on the Editorial Board of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, where he also serves as Program Director of Publications and Information Technology.

Since 1983, Nelson has worked in Xerox, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, Ariba and eBay in the area of Internationalization. While Nelson was at Sun, he was part of the development team for the first version of internationalized OpenWindows and he worked with X Consortium in defining Xlib Internationalization specification for X11R5. He also represented Sun in X/Open in defining Portable Layout Services: Context-dependent and Directional Text Specification for complex layout text languages. In Microsoft, he designed the Globalization Framework for the first internationalized version of Hotmail. Nelson has just completed a UTF-8 DB Migration project at eBay.

John O'Conner is now a technical writer and evangelist for Java technologies at Sun Microsystems. As a software engineer, he designed and implemented Unicode and internationalization APIs for the Java platform.  He sometimes contributes to the W3C GEO group and is also on the editorial board of Multilingual Computing. Previously as an engineer, he implemented internationalization and Unicode support in the Java platform core libraries and represented Sun on the Unicode Technical Committee.

P.J. Plauger, President, Dinkumware, Ltd., which supplies the Standard C++ library for Microsoft Visual C++ and many other leading compilers. P.J. Plauger has been active for many years in the standardization of the C and C++ programming languages.

Russ Rolfe is the Lead Program Manager for the Windows Globalization Evangelism team. He is an advocate to Microsoft development teams for international customers, letting the teams know what Microsoft's customers' international issues and needs are. He headed the creation of Microsoft's book, "Developing International Software - 2nd. Edition." He has been involved with Globalization, Internationalization and Localization for over 25 years. He spent five years with Weidner Communications as project manager developing a Japanese to English machine translation system. He was one of founding members of the OSCAR group who created the Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) standard and is currently a member of the W3Cs International GEO (Guidelines, Education and Outreach) Task Force.

Eva Sanchez joined Basis Technology project management team over 5 years ago. Since then, she has managed a large sum of internationalization projects of difference size across various industries.  Eva holds a Bachelors degree in Business, a Masters degree in Translation and a Certificate degree in Client/Server development.  Currently she is the Director of Project Management and has a team of 4 senior project managers.

Naoto Sato is a Java internationalization engineer in Sun Microsystems' Java & Developer Platforms Group. Currently his work is focused on enhancements of Locale class in Java. Prior to Sun, he worked in the internationalization team at IBM Japan. He holds a M. Engineering degree in Precision Machinery Systems from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.

Dale Schultz graduated from the University of Natal (South Africa) in 1982 and has worked on software on 4 continents since 1978. During the last 15 years he has specialized in the globalization and localization of software. As a team member of the Globalization Center of Competency in IBM, he is the owner of the IBM Globalization Verification Test (GVT) process as well as the GVT Wizard and GVT Guide. When not inventing solutions for IBM he writes software to control his model trains.

Han-yi Shaw is a Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office for Macintosh Team at Microsoft Corporation. He is the project lead for the Microsoft Word for Macintosh, as well as the project lead overseeing the suite-wide Unicode development efforts in Office for Macintosh. As project lead for the Microsoft Word for Macintosh, he was responsible for the design of many of the newly introduced features and functional improvements in Word 2004 for Macintosh, including the acclaimed Word Notebook Layout View. As International Program Manager, he was responsible for East Asian functionality introduced since Office 2001 and subsequently the newly introduced Unicode support in Office 2004. He is currently hard at work designing features for the next version of Word for Macintosh and leading the Next Generation User Experience efforts for the next version of Office for Macintosh. 

As Chairman and CEO, Dr. Soley is responsible for the vision and direction of the world's largest consortium of its type. Dr. Soley joined the nascent OMG as Technical Director in 1989, leading the development of OMG's world-leading standardization process and the original CORBA® specification. In 1996, he led the effort to move into vertical market standards (starting with healthcare, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing) and modeling, leading first to the Unified Modeling Language (UML®) and later the Model Driven Architecture (MDA®).

Previously, Dr. Soley was a cofounder and former Chairman/CEO of A. I. Architects, Inc., maker of the 386 HummingBoard and other PC and workstation hardware and software. Prior to that, he consulted for various technology companies and venture firms on matters pertaining to software investment opportunities. Dr. Soley has also consulted for IBM, Motorola, PictureTel, Texas Instruments, Gold Hill Computer and others. He began his professional life at Honeywell Computer Systems working on the Multics operating system.
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., Dr. Soley holds the bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

D. Neel Smith graduated from Harvard University in 1979 with a degree in classical archeology. A Fulbright Scholar, he studied classics at the Universitat Zurich. Smith earned a doctorate in classical archeology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is one of the developers of the Perseus Project, the multimedia database of Greek antiquity.

Ienup Sung has been working for Sun Microsystems, Inc. since 1992. In those years, he has been actively involved and has also led many Solaris internationalization projects. He also briefly worked for Oracle Corp. on RDBMS NLS issues at 1997. He represents Sun at the Unicode consortium. Prior to Sun, he worked at TriGem Computer, Inc. and Human Computers, Inc. at Korea as a technical lead on Korean computing issues.

He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and B.S. in Computer Science from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Korea.

Fred Susi spearheaded development of Zebra’s Global Printing Solution. By embedding support for Unicode encoded data into its printers, Zebra’s customers can seamlessly output any language(s) from their business applications without the need for special drivers.  For the past 5 years, Mr. Susi has worked for Zebra Technologies Corporation leading development for numerous high-end thermal printers. He holds both a BS and a MBA from the University of Illinois.

Suzuki Toshiya (ACM) earned his Ph.D. degree in Dept. of Physics from Tohoku University, Sendai, 1998. Since 2000, he has been working around printing-, fonts- and text-layout-related softwares in Open Source Softwares, especially around PostScript technology: GNU Yellow Vector Editor, GNUStep, Display Ghostscript, gs-cjk project, Ghostscript and FreeType. Now he is a member of Information Media Centre of Hiroshima University. 

Tex Texin has been providing globalization services including architecture, strategy, training, and implementation to the software industry for many years. Tex has created numerous globalized 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 http://www.I18nGuy.com and a site focused on the Progress Software community and others: http://www.XenCraft.com.

Tex is now Internationalization Architect for Yahoo!

Chun Jie Tong is a software engineer from Shanghai Globalization Lab, IBM China. He acted as a team leader in the globalization solution development team, focusing on globalization enablement for various industries and scenarios. Besides, he is an active writer for IBM developerWorks, and has published a number of articles on globalization and SOA.

Michael B. Toth has been the Program Manager and systems integrator for the Archimedes Palimpsest Program since 1999. Mr. Toth is an independent consultant with R.B.Toth Associates, which provides international strategic services for organizations seeking to structure appropriate and practical responses to complex issues. He provides systems integration and strategic planning for major technical efforts and for the study, preservation and display of cultural objects by museums and libraries. Mr. Toth brings extensive US Government experience with his work on space systems and subsystems. He currently also manages the integration of a range of US Government information systems and databases.

Daniel Yacob is the director of the Ge'ez Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of Ethiopic script in electronic environs.  Daniel has developed Ethiopic software for over a decade and was a participant in the 1995 draft proposal for the Ethiopic standard in Unicode.  He has continued to serve in an active role in standardization efforts both within Ethiopia and abroad.  Daniel is presently employed as a standards consultant for the Ethiopian Government and serves as an adjunct faculty of the Addis Ababa University Computer Science Department.