Announcements

Keynote for UTW 2025 Announced

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that Marc Weber from the Computer History Museum will be the keynote speaker for UTW 2025! Join us for this special keynote tracing the evolution of encoding and exploring how AI may open new possibilities for digitally disadvantaged languages.

From Clay to Code: The Story of Encoding

For millennia, humanity has been encoding language. From marks on clay and papyrus, brushstrokes on bark, knotted cords, and telegraph codes, each innovation has shaped how we communicate and preserve meaning. Claude Shannon’s information theory revealed that any form of written ancient or modern communication can be represented as binary, laying the foundation for today’s digital era. Join us for this special keynote tracing the evolution of encoding and exploring how AI may open new possibilities for digitally disadvantaged languages.

About the Speaker

Marc Weber is the Director and Curator of the Internet History Program at the Computer History Museum.

He is the founding curator of the Computer History Museum’s Internet History Program and an early pioneer of Web history, beginning his work in 1995. His first investigations as a journalist evolved into the Web History Project, the earliest archive of web materials and oral histories from more than 80 internet innovators. Marc later cofounded the Web History Center, a collaboration among Stanford University, the Internet Archive, Stanford Research Institute, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and organized landmark gatherings with the creators of the World Wide Web, hypertext, and ARPANET.

An award-winning technology writer and journalist, Marc has been featured by major outlets from the BBC to NPR’s Marketplace, presented at international conferences, advised documentaries for the History and Discovery Channels, and consulted in patent and corporate cases. He is the author or editor of four computer consulting guides and holds bachelor’s degrees in neurobiology and creative writing from Brown University.