Unicode Bulldog Award

On April 2nd 1997, Rick McGowan suggested that the consortium sponsor an occasional award for “outstanding personal contributions to the philosophy and dissemination of the Unicode Standard.”

In May 1997, Ken Whistler came up with the term “Bulldog” in reference to a remark made by Thomas Huxley to Henry Fairfield Osborn, in the mid 1870's:

Three months later, at the Eleventh International Unicode Conference, Mark Davis introduced the award for the first time. He said:

Unicode Bulldog Award Recipients

Honoree	Date	Location	Honored for
Jennifer Daniel	2021-10	Santa Clara	With a background in illustration, writing, and design, Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chair Jennifer Daniel has transformed the emoji selection process, bringing a more focused and efficient approach to handling the incoming proposals, while maintaining a designer’s eye on the result. With vibrant and engaging speaking skills, Jennifer has been an excellent public face for Unicode’s work in many forums, helping to open the eyes of people who only knew of us through emoji to the broader importance of the Consortium's work. We are proud to recognize Jennifer with the 2021 Unicode Bulldog award.
Kristi Lee	2020-10	Santa Clara	The 2020 Unicode Bulldog Award recognizes Kristi Lee for her significant contributions to the work of the Unicode Consortium’s CLDR Technical Committee. Upon joining the CLDR committee as Microsoft’s representative, Kristi quickly focused on improving CLDR development and release processes, enabling the CLDR team to work far more efficiently and effectively. This has improved the functionality of the CLDR Survey Tool, and thus better serves the users of CLDR releases. Among many other improvements, she instituted and organized periodic CLDR face-to-face meetings where the team can focus on strategic planning. Through all these efforts, Kristi has brought strong leadership to enable more streamlined development and a better focus on future directions. In 2020, Kristi was formally made Vice Chair of the CLDR Technical Committee, a role she had effectively filled for some time!
Andy Heninger	2019-10	Santa Clara	The 2019 Unicode Bulldog Award recognizes Andy Heninger for his many years of contributions to the work of the Unicode Consortium. Andy joined the International Components for Unicode (ICU) team in 2001 and took on crucial parts of ICU, notably segmentation and regular expressions. Prior to having these functions in ICU, support for segmenting Unicode data and the use of Unicode data in regular expressions was very limited. Both contributions are key to robust text support. For example, segmentation is what keeps combining sequences from breaking apart when line-wrapped, including keeping family emoji from splitting apart. Andy also took over responsibility for the Unicode Technical Standard for regular expressions and the Unicode Standard Annex for line breaking. He shepherded both through many revisions. For many years, Andy has been a bulldog for robust Unicode support on the ICU team. He has brought a wide range of expertise to bear on challenging problems and has always been willing to help out in any area he could.
Norbert Lindenberg	2019-10	Santa Clara	The 2019 Unicode Bulldog Award recognizes Norbert Lindenberg. Norbert is a subject matter expert who has been recognized for his significant contributions to internationalizing the Web and bringing script expertise to many of the Unicode Standard’s script models. He is a regular contributor to the Unicode Script Ad Hoc group, and his contributions have enhanced core internationalization support for Java and JavaScript. His work has been used by organizations such as Mozilla, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems and Apple. Recently he has been recognized for his work developing fonts for languages that use complex scripts such as Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Javanese and Tamil, contributing to the goals of the Unicode Consortium. In addition, in 2013 he received the prestigious ECMA award for his contribution to the JavaScript internationalization standards specification.
Ken Lunde	2018-09	Santa Clara	The 2018 Unicode Bulldog award recognizes Dr. Ken Lunde, of Adobe. Ken, a longstanding industry expert on CJK, has contributed for decades to the work on CJK fonts and about character encoding questions. He has written books (to help educate the rest of us), designed and has acted as registrar for the CJK ideographic variation database for the Unicode Consortium. He is a regular contributor to the work of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 IRG and has hosted countless meetings for the Unicode Editorial Committee and other internationalization efforts. For years he has encouraged and supported young contributors to engage with the Unicode Consortium's internationalization and character encoding work. Because of his years of tireless effort, expertise we rely on for our current work, and great support for our future contributors, this year we recognize Ken Lunde for his many contributions to the work of the Unicode Consortium and the worldwide internationalization community.
Liang Hai	2017-10	Santa Clara	Liang Hai got involved in the work of the Unicode Consortium in 2016. Immediately, he jumped in, became an individual member, attended UTC meetings, and joined the Editorial Committee and the Script Ad Hoc group. With our focus on improving the representation of the Mongolian script, Liang Hai and his team researched the Mongolian script in depth, presented their work to Unicode members, and kept working tirelessly on Mongolian. Liang stayed up all night from his home in China to attend multiple Script Ad Hoc meetings. He volunteered to document the key findings of the UTC and Script Ad Hoc meetings on Mongolian. At the SC2/WG2 Mongolian Ad Hoc three-day meeting in Inner Mongolia, he translated between English and Chinese for three days of technical discussions, and every night, prepared new presentations for the next day of meetings. Liang has been totally committed to fully documenting and clarifying the current understanding of the implementation of the Mongolian script, and has contributed greatly to the momentum to move us all forward to better understanding of the Mongolian script and how to best support it in implementations.
Richard Ishida	2016-11	Santa Clara	Anyone who has attended a Unicode conference in the last twenty five years knows that Richard Ishida has been a stellar and consistent contributor, usually giving full day in-depth tutorials, that spill over into many stimulating talks and other discussions. Starting from his days at Xerox in the 1990s, he has been on a never-ending crusade to educate the world's programmers to a wide variety of internationally important issues. In addition to his day job in internationalization at the W3C, he has been a valued contributor to the Unicode standard as a member of the Editorial Committee, and he serves on the IUC conference board as well. Please welcome Richard to the ranks of the Unicode bulldogs—a distinction that is long overdue.
Dr. Lu Qin	2015-10	Santa Clara	The Unicode Consortium awards Dr. Lu Qin with the Unicode Bulldog Award, in recognition for her highly-valued contribution to Unicode. Since 2004, Dr. Lu has led the Ideographic Rapporteur Group in the work of identifying Han Ideograph characters suitable for encoding in ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode. This challenging work has included collecting candidates from multiple sources, evaluating unification considerations, preparing input into the Unicode and ISO standardization processes, and collaborating closely with the editorial teams to drive process to the completed end result, encoding of unified CJKV ideographs in the published international and industry standards. Since 2004, over 10,000 unified CJKV ideographs have been added to Unicode. Dr. Lu’s work in driving this process has had important impact not only for Unicode but also for people throughout the world using unified CJKV ideographs in Unicode every day. Dr. Lu has been a regular contributor to the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences, bringing her important CJKV work to the broader community.
Shriramana Sharma	2014-11	Santa Clara	Shriramana began contributing to Unicode in 2009, when he submitted detailed comments on proposals for Grantha, Tamil, and other Indic scripts. The erudite nature of his documents has become a hallmark of all his submissions. He has been passionately devoted to work on Indic scripts in Unicode, often calling in to the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) meetings when it is very late in India, in order to participate in the UTC discussions on topics of interest. He has written and called government representatives in India to spur them to action on Unicode-related topics; he has prepared many character proposals himself, submitted corrections to the UDHR, and sent in many suggestions for improvements to the wording of the Unicode Standard. Without the tireless work of Shriramana, the Unicode Standard would be less accurate, less useful, and less comprehensive. He was a clear and worthy choice for the 2014 Bulldog Award.
Laurențiu Iancu	2014-11	Santa Clara	Laurențiu has participated in the development of the Unicode Standard for many years now, both in his role as a representative of Microsoft to the Unicode Technical Committee and as a member of the Editorial Committee. But 2014 was a new high water mark for Laurențiu’s many contributions. He took on significant responsibility for the maintenance of the Unicode Character Database, and his attention to detail caught many potential problems in the data and test files for Unicode 7.0. Laurențiu helped extensively with the editing of the Unicode 7.0 Core Specification. His contributions did not stop there, however. He also played a major role in the recent updates to the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, including the design and management of comprehensive testing of the changes in the algorithm, and coordination of the development of reference implementations. Laurențiu’s continuing, dogged attention to detail and quality, and his “never let go” attitude when it comes to getting things right made him a truly deserving candidate for the Unicode Bulldog Award!
Koji Ishii	2013-10	Santa Clara	When Rakuten joined the Unicode Consortium at the associate level, they sent Koji Ishii to the next meeting of the Unicode Technical committee to discuss the representation of vertical text in Unicode. Koji attended his first UTC meeting to discover that the draft technical report on vertical text layout was mired in controversy. Undaunted, when the editorship became open during that meeting and there were not many eager to step in, Koji took on the editorship. Over the months, Koji worked to isolate the problems and create agreemnts. He negotiated with the W3C and the many members of the Unicode Technical Committee. He became a member of the Unicode Editorial Committee and worked odd hours to participate with the Editorial Committee to review and polish the technical report. A short time ago, the Consortium announced the first publication of Unicode Technical Report #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout. So for his calmness and courage under fire, and commitment to bringing a tough undertaking to a successful conclusion, the Consortium would like to recognize Koji Ishii with a 2013 Bulldog award.
Peter Edberg	2013-10	Santa Clara	Peter Edberg has demonstrated great perseverance in promoting internationalization over many years. He has played a major role in the development of the Unicode CLDR locales project and within the Unicode Technical Committee. He has also made key contributions to the success of ICU, the premier open-source Unicode library. Aside from his technical contributions, Peter has consistently kept CLDR releases on track through his focus on reviewing bugs, tracking the outstanding reviews, and driving development to closure. Within the UTC, Peter brings great thoroughness, preparation and deep experience to encoding complex sets of characters. Peter's thorough and thoughtful reviews of the large emoji repertoire contributed to the successful support of these complex symbols in diverse implementations.
Yoshito Umaoka	2011-10	Santa Clara	Yoshito Umaoka is well recognized as a technical leader in the area of internationalization support for Unicode CLDR, BCP47, OpenJDK, and ICU. His contributions to the Java 7 Locale and the U extension U were vital to their success. Yoshito's expansive knowledge and experience in product development made him a leader in the ICU Java development, and in the Unicode CLDR community.
Anshuman Pandey	2011-10	Santa Clara	“Anshuman Pandey’s first Unicode proposal was submitted in 2005, a 37-page proposal for Kaithi. Since then, he has written numerous successful script proposals, including: Kaithi, Khojki, Khudawadi, Mahajani, Pau Cin Hau, Sharada, Takri and Tirhuta, and included fonts he designed himself. With 28 script proposals "in process" at the moment, and ever alert to uncovering more scripts, he will be filling the Unicode pipeline for years to come!”
John Emmons	2010-10	Santa Clara	“John is extremely passionate and dedicated regarding the CLDR work. His recent effort in integrating ANLoc data into the CLDR release v1.8 is a perfect example. John not only coordinated with the Afrigen project members, he also completed a significant amount of review work to ensure the integration takes place smoothly. Considering this involves 72 African languages with 41 of them totally new to the CLDR project, this is no small feat. John has been a major contributor to the CLDR success and he is well regarded in his leadership on this subject.”
Kat Momoi	2010-10	Santa Clara	“Katsuhiko “Kat” Momoi is recognized with a Unicode Bulldog award in 2010 for his valuable contribution to encoding of Emoji symbols in Unicode 6.0. Kat was an initiator for the idea of encoding Emoji in 2007, and continued to champion Emoji all the way through the standardization process. At critical points in the process, he traveled to Japan to engage with local vendors to build consensus for the interoperable encoding of Emoji. Unicode 6.0 would be missing a key feature were it not for his important contribution.”
Steven R. Loomis	2009-10	San José	"Steven Loomis is recognized with a 2009 Unicode Bulldog award. Steven has demonstrated great perseverance in promoting internationalization over many years. He has made key contributions to the success of ICU, the premier open-source Unicode library. He has also played a major role in the development of the Unicode CLDR locales project. Not only has he contributed to the design of CLDR and LDML, he has also led in the design and development of the CLDR Survey Tool, which is the major vehicle for data entry and assessment."
Roozbeh Pournader	2009-10	San José	"Roozbeh Pournader, the recipient of a 2009 Unicode Bulldog award, has been the go-to guy for the Unicode Consortium on a wide variety of topics, especially dealing with the Middle East and Central Asia. Roozbeh has jumped in to help solve a number of issues regarding the shaping model for the Arabic script, resulting in a more robust and extensible model. He has also played an important role in gathering Unicode locale data (CLDR) for Farsi and other languages."
Michael Kaplan	2008-09	San José	"... Michael Kaplan is such a true friend of Unicode, and so dedicated to supporting the cause, that his tiny company once joined at the full member level, so that he could have a vote in the UTC on topics of importance. Even without his vote, Michael's voice and his passion would be hard to miss. He has blogged about Unicode and supported the Consortium for many years, first through his own company and later through his work at Microsoft. Please join me in welcoming Michael to the ranks of the Unicode Bulldogs."
Sandra O'Donnell	2004-09	San José	".. Sandra has been contributing to the Internationalization and Unicode communities for many years. A noted author who played a key role in Standards development through her work with WG20, she is an expert in Unix internationalization and a fearless champion of minimizing encoding forms, establishing rigor in the development of the Unicode Standard and creating only well defined relevant international standards. "
Tex Texin	2004-03	Washington DC	"...participated in the definition of the Unicode Standard for many years in the 90's and over this last ten years has contributed in the W3C arena to the internationalization of web protocols, focusing on the character model, web services, and outreach and guidelines. He has been a major contributor to Unicode conferences, as a presenter and as a key contributor to the conference review board, where he has been taking the lead in developing the call for papers and the press releases, in addition to his valuable input to the themes and programs of the conference."
Eric Muller	2003-09	Atlanta	".. For his peerless work leading the production phase of the publication of Unicode 4.0, Eric Muller is recognized with the 2003 Unicode Bulldog Award."
Markus Scherer	2002-09	San José	"...Markus's enthusiasm and dedication to the Unicode goals have allowed significant improvements in the quality and capabilities of products worldwide, and we are very glad to present him with this award."
Arnold Winkler	2002-01	Washington DC	Arnold Winkler was a great partner with Unicode coming originally from the INCITS standards community. As the L2 chair from 1995 to 2002, he worked tirelessly to coordinate Unicode and INCITS work. He also took on Unicode document management and provided the organization and attention to detail that was clearly needed to enable the Unicode Technical Committee to address and respond to the proposals for character encoding coming in from all corners of the world. Arnold was the original Unicode "doc meister".
Michael Everson	2000-09	San José	".. Your enthusiasm for encoding scripts, determination, and follow-through have enabled the Unicode Standard to significantly expand its repertoire of new scripts in Version 2 and, most recently, in the publication of Unicode Version 3."
Isai Scheinberg	2000-09	San José	".. the merger of the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646 would not have happened without your determination, unique efforts, and consummate negotiating skills"
Thomas Milo	2000-03	Amsterdam	Tom Milo has been engaged with Unicode for many years, contributing his deep Arabic expertise to the Unicode encoding of Arabic, providing fonts for publication of the standard, and supporting the internationalization and Unicode conferences. He has long been blazing the trail for Unicode implementations in the Arabic-speaking world.
Eiji Matsuoka	1999-09	San José	Eiji Matsuoka is a Professor, Classical Chinese Literature and Chinese Language at Tokyo Gakugei University as well as a Member of ISO/SC2 and IRG. Professor Matsuoka is the 1999 recipient of the Unicode Consortium's Bulldog award for his tireless efforts in preparing the 608-page Sanseido Unicode Dictionary, which made Unicode kanji character information available for the first time in a reference format widely used by information technologists in Japan. The book also serves as a general reference on Han character encoding. Its publication is another significant step forward in the acceptance and adoption of Unicode in a major economy.
Tatsuo Kobayashi	1999-09	San José	Tatsuo Kobayashi was an early supporter of the Unicode Standard from the Japanese technology industry. At a time when many in East Asia were worried about CJK unification, Kobayashi-san was a tremendous leader in support of unification. He helped the Consortium to identify and to address the concerns of the Japanese communities and promoted the use of Unicode in Japan. He was active in the Unicode Technical Committee for many years, supported Unicode conferences, and was elected to the Board of Directors of the Unicode Consortium in 1996 and served in that capacity through 2013.
Ed Hart	1998-09	San José	Ed Hart was a driving force in the merger of ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard. He moderated the original ad hoc meeting group to discuss the merger of the two standards. When all others had lost hope of a successful outcome, Ed persevered until there was agreement to a single repertoire for both standards. A true consensus builder, Ed, along with other colleagues, was instrumental in creating the foundation of what is today the one worldwide character encoding. An early supporter of the Unicode Standard, Ed was one of the first recipients of the Unicode Bulldog Award.
Martin Dürst	1997-09	San José	" .. in recognition of his internationalization of HTML, his driving the use of Unicode in URLs, his tireless advocacy of Unicode in W3C and IETF, and his relentless championing of Han Unification"
Misha Wolf	1997-09	San José	"..in recognition of his tenacity in pushing browser vendors towards Unicode, of his dedication to organizing these international Unicode conferences, and of his tireless efforts to bring net issues to the Unicode Technical Committee"

The Unicode® Bulldog Award

Unicode Bulldog Award Recipients