Unicode Directors, Officers and Staff

Ayman is the Group Engineering Manager of the Office Core Experiences team responsible for the shared components that Office use to build their applications, including UX, UI platform, text rendering and editing, font management and accessibility. Prior to this, Ayman managed different internationalization teams that built the globalization and localization platform for Office applications, including multilingual and machine translation features. Ayman started at Microsoft in 1990 as a software design engineer and worked on BiDirectional enabling of some of Microsoft key products including DOS, Windows, IE, Word and PowerPoint. Ayman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from University of Arizona.

Helena Shih Chapman is the IBM Globalization Executive. She has extensive experiences in various areas at IBM. She spent a 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 experience with the International Components for Unicode. Before joining IBM, she worked at Taligent, Dataware and Apple. In her spare time, she manages the information security compliance program for IBM Cloud Platform services and is an ISACA certified information security manager (CISM).

Helena holds an MS in computer science from the University of Massachusetts.

Bob is the Director of Engineering for Internationalization at Google. He built and leads the globally distributed team that develops highly scalable technologies and infrastructure used throughout Google to deliver internationalized and localized products. Previously, at Netscape, he built the team that established much of the early work on internationalization for the web and browsers. Even earlier, he helped drive the initial Unix/POSIX internationalization specifications and standards via work with industry consortiums (/usr/grp, Uniforum, Unix International). Prior to Google, Bob worked for Netscape/AOL, Apple, MIPS, Nippon Unisoft and UniSoft. He holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Marypat Meuli graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and Mathematics/Computer Science. She obtained her Masters in Business Administration from IESE (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa) in Barcelona, Spain, with an emphasis on international business. She is currently working on scaling out infrastructure at Zillow Group and has previously worked at Microsoft and QuintilesIMS. Marypat has extensive experience in internationalization and global service deployments.

Matthew is Director and General Manager for Adobe's Typekit subscription font service and Adobe's in-house type foundry, one of the oldest and best-known in the industry. He leads the Typekit product team, which provides millions of Adobe Creative Cloud users with easy access to a large library of high-quality fonts for use on desktop and the web. Typekit recently introduced a capability that makes it easy for web publishers to use CJK fonts in their HTML designs, significantly advancing the state of the art in regions where very large font file sizes have long hampered web font adoption.

Matthew's career on the internet began in the 1980s. His first company, Interactive Marketing Solutions, was one of the first solely focused on designing and building dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) software for commercial applications. He spent the next 20 years leading the technical teams at several large digital agencies and client service firms. As CTO of digital agency Schematic (now part of WPP) Matthew led the teams that built hundreds of large-scale e-commerce and CMS systems for many of the world's largest companies. Today, he leads one of the largest and most prestigious teams in the type industry, focused on solving the technical, licensing, and business challenges involved in making the best quality type accessible to everybody.

Alolita wants to see core non-Latin languages fully represented on the Web. She believes the way forward depends on the adoption of open source and open standards like Unicode. Alolita believes the Unicode Consortium serves a vital role in language standardization and bridging the digital divide. She is principal technologist enabling open source at Amazon Web Services. Previously, she headed internationalization, localization and NLP engineering teams at PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia. She holds multiple degrees in Computer Science and mentors women engineers and advises startups.

Celia Vigil is the Senior Director for Frameworks at Apple Inc. In this role, she is responsible for internationalization, fonts and multilingual support on OS X and iOS. The team is responsible for delivering state-of-the-art text processing and layout technology, font management, Unicode support, and natural language processing technologies. These technologies are required to support the wide variety of languages supported on Apple products.

Celia Vigil holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from University of California Davis and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Greg Welch is Director of Strategic Marketing in Intel’s PC Client Group. Among his recent accomplishments has been responsibility for driving the formulation and coordination of Intel’s Ultrabook™ program. Previous positions at Intel include:

• Director, Intel’s Architecture Group, Global WIMAX Organization, responsible for business development relationships between Intel, Clearwire, Best Buy and OEMs to promote the world’s first national 4G network.
• As Director of Strategy and Industry Initiatives in Intel’s Software and Solutions Group, Greg drove Intel’s efforts to enable software for multi-core architectures.
• Director of Strategic Planning for Intel's Mobile Platforms Group. Greg oversaw long-range roadmap planning and business strategy for all notebook platform, processor, and chipset products that became the Core® family of processors.
• Director of Brand Strategy. Greg spearheaded the segmentation of Intel’s processor brands including the Itanium® and Xeon® brands for high-end server products, and the Celeron® brand for value PCs.

Dachuan is the Group Engineer Manager for Microsoft PowerPoint, a leading productivity application integrating text, graphics and multimedia content. He was the lead who drove the introduction of a modern text engine into PowerPoint, and the main proponent behind its multicultural support. He also has extensive experience in search technologies. He holds a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona.

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 4647), 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.

 Lisa Moore, Senior Manager, works for IBM where she manages the globalization of IBM's Analytics Platform products. Her organization leads the globalization and translation efforts at the Silicon Valley Lab (SVL) in San Jose, California, and she manages the adoption of new globalization features for the total portfolio of products.
In the IT industry, Lisa has contributed actively to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard since 1993. She has been an editor of the Unicode Standard since Version 2. She was appointed a Vice President of the Unicode Consortium in 1996 and has been chair of the Unicode Technical Committee, and vice-chair of the INCITS L2 Committee (US National Standards Body Character Encoding Committee) since May,1999, in which capacity she manages the technical agenda of the Unicode Standard decision-making body. She chaired or co-chaired International Unicode Conferences from 1995 through 2005, running the conference program committee. She has been an invited keynote speaker or panelist at groups as divers as the LRC 2006, GK3 2007, and the International Telugu Internet Conference 2011. She has also participated on the program committee of the Conference on Human Language Technology for Development 2011 (HLTD2011), and is on the editorial board of Localization Focus. In February, 2012 she became Chief Financial Officer of the Consortium.

Mr. Michel Suignard worked for more than twenty five years at Microsoft where he held various positions in the development and sales divisions. He was involved in the development of OS/2, Windows, and more recently Vista in areas such as globalization, coded character sets, and typography. He is now self-employed and is keeping an interest in standardization work such as coded characters set and International Domain Names (IDN). Michel is also the project editor of ISO/IEC 10646 which is the ISO standard aligned with the Unicode Standard.

Peter Constable grew up in eastern Canada and studied Applied Math at the University of Waterloo. He went on to studied in Linguistics and to work as a linguistics teacher and researcher with SIL International, including five years working in Thailand. While in Thailand, he was exposed to challenges of supporting non-Latin scripts in software systems and digital fonts. He began working on software internationalization in 1996 and became active in work on Unicode and other i18n standards activities shortly thereafter. Since 2003, he has worked for Microsoft on various projects related to Unicode and internationalization as part of the Windows engineering team. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008 and a Vice President in 2013.

Mr. Rick McGowan was appointed Technical Director of Unicode, Inc. in July 1992, then Vice President in 1998. He became Technical Vice President in 2011. In 2001, he joined Unicode as a Sr. software engineer and a member of its staff. Prior to that Rick was employed by NeXT Software, Inc. and subsequently Apple Computer, Inc. He joined Unicode, Inc. to provide dedicated technical expertise. Mr. McGowan has long been an active participant in the Unicode Technical Committee, and participated in the working group prior to the formation of the Consortium. He is now active in the development of proposals for the standardization of Scripts not currently included in the Standard. He is also Chair of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference Program Committee.

Dr. Deborah Anderson joined the Unicode Consortium as a technical director in 2007. Prior to that she was involved in the Unicode effort as an invited expert then as UC Berkeley's representative to the Unicode Consortium since 2005. Deborah is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and runs its Script Encoding Initiative (and ran its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project).  She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies. 

Dr. Ken Whistler formerly worked at SAP in database software, implementing Unicode in database-related products and prior to that at Metaphor, Inc., where he helped design and implement the Unicode-based internationalization of the Metaphor Data Interpretation Systems. He has a BA in Chinese from Stanford University, 1972 and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He pursued an early career in Sinology, learning both Japanese and Chinese in the course of studying in Japan and in Taiwan. His graduate work focused on the Native American languages of California, including an extended period of field work, archival work, and lexicography. He has developed and marketed text analysis software for linguists.

Markus Scherer is a member of the Google software internationalization team, focusing on the effective use of Unicode and on the development and deployment of cross-product internationalization libraries. Previously, he was manager, tech lead and software engineer at IBM. He has been a major contributor to ICU since 1999 and designed and developed significant portions of the character conversion, bidi, normalization, Unicode properties, and collation functionality. Markus is an alumnus of the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Peter Edberg has worked on internationalization, text and language support at Apple since 1988. He has been Apple’s representative to Unicode for many years, and has been actively involved since 2008 with the CLDR and ICU projects. Previously he worked in SRI International’s Bioinformation Systems Group and at a startup developing handwriting input systems for Japanese and Chinese. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering Science from Caltech.

Steven R. Loomis has been a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San José for over 15 years, where he is the Technical Lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C). After discovering the world of internationalization during a temporary assignment to a bidirectional text project, he joined the ICU team in 1998. He assisted with the formation of the CLDR project, and continues to develop and maintain its Survey Tool data collection application. Besides speaking at IUC conferences, he has presented before the International Mac Users (IMUG), the Localization Certification Program of CSU Chico, as well as internal IBM events. His hobbies include Maltese language advocacy.

Craig Cummings has been working in the field of software globalization for over 25 years. Before his recent role at VMware, Craig worked with Informatica on big data internationalization and also worked at Zynga making games in a variety of languages including Arabic. Before that, at Yahoo! Inc., he helped drive corporate technical strategy for internationalization with a particular focus on Middle Eastern markets. Prior to that, Craig was with Oracle's Tools and Applications globalization teams where he worked closely with Sun's internationalization team to shape some of the pluggable locale, resource bundle, font, and supplementary character support in Java.

Mr. Emmons is currently a senior software engineer for the IBM corporation and has been extensively involved in software internationalization for more than 24 years. He first served as the lead globalization architect for IBM's AIX operating system, and now contributes as a member of IBM's ICU development team. His major areas of expertise are in operating systems development and complex text layout technologies. Since 2005, John has been working extensively on Unicode's CLDR project, and is currently serving as the chairman of Unicode's CLDR technical committee.

Jennifer 8. Lee is the founder of Emojination, a grassroots group whose motto is "Emoji by The People, For the People" which played a role in passing the hijab and dumpling emojis. She is also the founder of Emojicon, a conference celebrating all things emoji.She is the co-founder and CEO of Plympton, a San Francisco-based literary studio that innovates in digital publishing. A former New York Times reporter, Jenny is a producer of “The Search for General Tso,” and and the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Jenny also serves on the boards for the Nieman Foundation, the Center for Public Integrity, the Digital Public Library of America, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hacks/Hackers, as well as committees for the New York Public Library Young Lions committee, the Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards, and SXSW programming. Jenny has served as the lead judge for the Knight News Challenge, and on the launch team for Upworthy. Jenny graduated with a degree in Applied Math and Economics from Harvard, where she was vice president of The Harvard Crimson.

Jeremy Burge is the founder and Editor in Chief of Emojipedia responsible for documenting Unicode emoji updates and vendor font releases. He has participated as a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee since 2015 and currently a vice-chair. Prior to founding Emojipedia, Jeremy was involved in consulting for educational institutions including University of Canberra, University of Western Sydney and University of New England. Jeremy has been an invited speaker at events including TEDxEast End (London, UK), The Next Web (Amsterdam, Netherlands), and Úll (Killarney, Ireland) and is an alumnus of Deakin University, Melbourne Australia.

Yoshito Umaoka is a software globalization engineer at IBM. 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.

Julie Allen has been involved with the Unicode Standard since Version 2.1, writing, editing and managing various projects for the Consortium. She earned a Ph.D. in Germanics from the University of Washington and an undergraduate degree in English and German from the University of Michigan. She works hard to translate long convoluted sentences into clear, precise prose and to keep group projects moving forward on schedule.

Ellen brings years of administrative experience in a variety of industries and settings including corporate as well as non-profit organizations. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Masters in Business Administration.

See under Technical Officers above.