Markus Scherer is the technical lead of the IBM Unicode Technology group's contributions to ICU. His contributions include the bidirectional text support added to ICU version 1.3 and improved character set support. Since graduating from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in Computer Science he worked on projects for Wireless and Mobile Computing with IBM in Germany and North Carolina. A strong interest in languages brought him into the Internationalization parts of the projects, where he assisted translation efforts and wrote tools that made use of Unicode.