Mike Ksar

Senior Program Manager, International Standards Strategy, Microsoft Corporation

Convener JTC1/SC2/WG2 Technical Working Group on ISO 10646

Unicode Consortium Board Member

Mike Ksar recently accepted a new position in the Standards Strategy team at Microsoft Corporation as Senior Program Manager. In September 2000, Mike had accepted an early retirement offer from Hewlett-Packard Company after more than 24 years of service. Mike has been working in the IT industry for nearly 40 years. He spent about 18 years in the area of internationalization programs and processes in R&D at HP product divisions and in the field, five years of which at HP in Geneva, Switzerland managing the development of localized products for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese and languages of Eastern Europe.

For the last 11 years, Mike has been the Convener of the ISO technical working group (JTC1/SC2/WG2) that developed and published ISO/IEC 10646. His term as Convener has been extended for three more years in September 2000. Mike is also a member of the Unicode Consortium Board of Directors; his term as a Board member has been extended for three more years in November 2000. He is very active in both the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) as well as the Unicode Editorial Committee. He was a key player towards the merging of the first version of Unicode and ISO 10646 and continues to play a significant role in supporting the continued development, convergence and synchronization of ISO 10646 and Unicode. He is a contributing author and editor to Unicode 3.0.

In his new position at Microsoft, Mike will continue to participate in several standards development organizations including Unicode, US-JTC 1 Tag, NCITS/L2, 3GPP, W3C, CEN TC304, ECMA and possibly others.

During his tenure at HP, Mike published several guidelines that focus on Globalization and the product generation process.

Mike has an MBA from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California and a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.