Nicholas Ostler holds an MA in classics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, and a PhD in linguistics from MIT. His first job was teaching in Japan, later consulting on machine translation for Fujitsu. Returning to England, he worked in IT research during the 1980s and '90s, especially with the UK government, and the European Union. He has been Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org) since its inception in 1996. He also edited its newsletter Ogmios until 2006. Within descriptive linguistics, his main research field has been the grammar of the (extinct) Chibcha language of Colombia. He has served on the board of the British National Corpus, the LSA's Committee for Endangered Languages, and on the editorial board of the International Journal of American Linguistics. As a writer, his book "Empires of the Word: a language history of the world" (HarperCollins, 2005) traced the histories of the large literate languages, from Sumerian to English, considering the factors that make for large-scale expansion. Later, "Ad Infinitum: a biography of Latin" (Walker & Co., 2007) considered the attitudes that have accompanied the Latin language throughout its 2,500 year recorded history. He is now at work on a book about the prospects of English as a global lingua franca, in the light of the competition, past and present. This is due for publication in 2010.

Presenters:

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. 

Adam Asnes founded Lingoport in 2001 after seeing firsthand that the niche for software globalization engineering products and services was underserved in the localization industry. As Lingoport’s President and CEO, he focuses on sales and marketing alliances while maintaining oversight of the company’s internationalization services engineering and Globalyzer product development. Adam is a frequent speaker and columnist on globalization technology as it affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach. For creative inspiration and fun, Adam enjoys cycling and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Manish Bhargava is Product Manager for Internationalization(i18n) efforts at Google. He helps drive Google's 40-language initiative. He graduated from Stanford University with 2 Masters - Computer Science, Aeronautics & Astronautics. He has Bachelors from IIT Bombay, India.

Marco Aurelio Carvalho is a senior software engineer at Yahoo Inc. He works on the globalization group where he participates on the design and development of a company wide localization tool. He worked on several different projects and libraries, focusing on internationalization and globalization solutions. Marco worked previously on localizing products at Yahoo! Brazil for Latin America markets. 

Ryan Cavalcante has been a Software Development Engineer in Test for the Globalization Services workgroup at Microsoft for the past 6 years, involved in such globalization technologies as collation, encoding, normalization, IDN, and most recently the Extended Linguistic Services platform.

Dr. Richard Cook is a researcher in linguistics at UC Berkeley and at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. He is an editor of Unicode 5.0, contributor to the Script Encoding Initiative, and author of the recent book Classical Chinese Combinatorics. He is co-author of the Character Description Language (CDL) Specification.

Cindy Conlin is a software engineer at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and is the Church's liaison to the Unicode Consortium. Cindy is a former Oracle employee. She graduated from Brigham Young University.

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.

Laura Cuozzo has been a senior user experience researcher at Google for 2.5 years.  Laura was the lead UR on Adwards. 

Douglas Davidson has worked on Mac OS X and its predecessors at NeXT and Apple since 1996, primarily working on the Mac OS X subsystems dealing with localization and text. He currently leads a group at Apple dealing with natural language data and processing.

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 globalize 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.

Behdad is an Iranian who grew up loving programming and typography. In high school, he was introduced to data structures and algorithms, and after a couple years of studying these concepts, he ended up pursuing a computer engineering BSc program at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran. It was around this time when he found about the true way of Unix, as well as Free Software, GNU, and GNOME projects.

Nine years later, he's finished his MSc in computer science at the University of Toronto, and joined Red Hat in the Toronto office. He's become an expert in bidirectional scripts (like Arabic) and the Unicode standard, and would like to see Pango eventually used in a multilingual, internationalized, full-fledged print-quality desktop publishing system one day. He also dreams of a world where GNOME rocks on every desktop and laptop, and where he doesn't have to report bugs every other day.

Margie Foster is currently the localization project manager for Moblin, an open source Linux-based operating system with an exciting new user interface designed for Intel’s hottest new processor, the Atom. Margie has a love of localization going back many years, including working on video-conferencing software and help files, the Intel Year 2000 support website, and Intel’s developer support website. She thoroughly enjoys working with people around the world, and has had opportunities to visit many of the countries of her L10N colleagues. Prior to her technology career at Intel, she was a certified operating room registered nurse. She whole-heartedly supports Loïc and Michael in their crusade for i18n and L10N awareness at Intel.

Benedicto Franco Jr is an Internationalization Solution Architect and member of the Globalization team at Yahoo! Inc. He has more than two decades of software development experience. 

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. 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.

Tomas Galicia is from Spain. He studied in Spain and France and came to the US after his University years. Soon after he started his career in translation and localization. He began working with Intel in 2003 focusing on localization of software and marketing material in Spanish. He currently works as a Solution Quality Analyst leveraging over 15 years of experience in the field.

Michael Kuperstein has been working deep in the trenches of many localization projects, produced in partnership between Intel's in-house localization group and Intel business units. Michael was hired by Intel in 1996 as a software engineer, later transferring to Intel's localization team in 2001 as the dotcom bubble burst. He wears many hats as a localization engineer, software architect, application developer, tool wrangler, speaker, group historian, and all around go-to / fix-it guy for software internationalization. Armed with a vast array of creative concepts, software tools, internal social networking sites, defect reports and screenshots, financial data, and presentations, Michael is on a mission to evangelize proper internationalization and localization at Intel.

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

Su Liu, advisory software engineer, is working on globalization enablement for IBM's AIX operating system. His major areas of expertise are in character set conversion, ideographic language IME, keyboard, and complex text layout technologies.

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.

Ken Lunde has been working for Adobe Systems Incorporated, headquartered in San Jose, California, for over eighteen years, and is currently a Senior Computer Scientist in CJKV Type Development. He spent a year-and-a-half revising "CJKV Information Processing," and the second edition was published at the end of 2008.

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.

An early multilingual education served to stimulate Kamal’s interest in languages, alphabets, and later on, typography. His studies have spanned Computer Science, Linguistics, and Product Design. Having worked at Monotype for over 13 years, Kamal has been involved in the many aspects of multilingual typography and font development. During that time, he has also participated actively in various activities related to the Unicode Standard. In the last few years, his work has included OpenType implementations for various scripts including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Japanese. Since 2006, he has served on the Board of Adviser of the Script Encoding Initiative of UC Berkeley. In Spring 2009, he taught a linguistics course at Stanford University entitled "Writing Systems in a Digital Age".

Michael is a specialist in globalization of applications and distributed systems with over one and a half 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.

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 technology. 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 armored 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.

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.

Derek Murman is the Senior Lead Program Manager for MUI Technologies in the Windows International group. He has 12 years of experience at Microsoft. In addition his current position in Windows International, Derek has worked on the Windows Update service and several enterprise server products.

Umesh P. Nair has been a software engineer for 18 years and is a part of the Internationalization team at Google since 2007. In addition to projects related to Unicode and Internationalization, he has contributed to several projects related to International calendars in Google as well as his previous jobs.

Mihai Nita has been working in the localization/internationalization field for 12 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.

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 Pournader is an internationalization expert at HighTech Passport, a company specializing in localization and internationalization services. Roozbeh has been working on software bidirectionalization for his whole professional life, since 1996.

As a native speaker of Persian, Roozbeh has had ample opportunity to experience the challenges of bidirectionalization firsthand. He is an author of multiple standards and technical reports for Persian support in software for Iran and Afghanistan, and a contributor to the Unicode Standard.

Roozbeh contributes to various free software projects and is an advocate of open source software development. He represents the GNOME Foundation in the Unicode Consortium.

Elizabeth Pyatt is an instructional designer at Penn State with a background in linguistics. She maintains the Penn State "Computing with Accents and Symbols Web Site" at tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/ and maintains a blog documenting her Unicode experiences at www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/index.html.

Brent Ramerth works on internationalization and natural language processing for the iPhone and Mac OS X platforms at Apple Inc. 

Jens is a senior researcher in Google's User Experience team in London. Prior to Google he conducted research for LBi, Microsoft Research, and Amazon. Jens holds a PhD in Human Computer Interaction from University College London (UCL).

Charles Riley is a catalog librarian for African Languages at Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. His time in the field includes research on scripts of six West African countries over the past five years, most recently in Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and a fourth return to Senegal, where he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

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 7 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.

Ilya Shtein is an IT Architect with the Enterprise Software Architecture team at Metavante Corporation. His focus is on creating an architectural foundation for software internationalization across Metavante's Global Banking platform, as well as evangelizing Internationalization within the company.

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. 

Andrew joined Google in December 2005 and is currently the technical program manager for Internationalization(i18n). He holds a MSc/BSc of Computer Science from the University of Victoria, as well as professional certifications from Stanford University. 

Frank works for Google Inc. as software engineer since fall 2005. Frank spent the past 16 yeas developing global software. Before joining Google, Frank worked for AOL, Netscape, Apple Computer and III (Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan, ROC). In the last 10 years, Frank architected and led the Mozilla internationalization development and managed the Netscape Client International and Text Engineering team. Frank received his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University, Boston and College Graduate Diploma from Ming-Hsing Junior Engineering College, Taiwan, ROC.

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.

Wenchao Tong is a software engineer at Google Inc. He is a member of the Google software internationalization team. He works on input technology projects, including the virtual keyboard api.

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.

Loic Dufresne de Virel is currently a Localization Strategist with Intel in-house localization team. In this role, his main activities include promoting the use across Intel business units of a recently deployed Translation Management System, and constantly advocating for proper and improved Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N) practices and processes, for Web, Software, and "print" collateral. Prior to moving to Oregon, and joining Intel, where he has been involved in Localization for the past 10 years, Loïc spent a few years in Costa Rica, working as a regional technical adviser for the UNCTAD.

Chris Weber is co-founder at Casaba Security where he’s leading product development for new tools to assist in the field of Unicode and Web-application security. He has spent years focusing on software security testing for some of the world’s leading software development companies and online properties. He’s authored several security books, articles and presentations, and regularly speaks at industry conferences. He’s worked as a security researcher and consultant for over a decade identifying hundreds of security vulnerabilities in many widely used products.