Presenters' Biographies 

As Senior Vice President of Engineering & Technology, Tuoc Luong oversees all engineering and technology issues for the Company. Luong, who joined Ask Jeeves in February 2002, is responsible for the overall direction, resource allocation and operations of Ask Jeeves' engineering and technology groups across the Unites States and internationally. Luong brings extensive technology background, market sensitivity, vision and pursuit of technology excellence.

Prior to Ask Jeeves, Luong was general manager for Microsoft's BackOffice, and Hosted Service. He was one of the key executives leading the effort for Microsoft's Software as Services initiative and built the company's first Hosted Knowledge Worker MegaService. Before joining Microsoft, Luong was vice president of research for Baan Company where he was responsible for Baan's future technology architecture.

Luong also served as VP of Development at Borland, where he was responsible for the entire Delphi client/server product line. Luong has held management positions with Pyramid Technology, Oracle Corporation and Informix Software. The 18th employee at Informix, Luong was the original author of the company's internationalization technology and one of three original authors of Informix-Turbo, now called Online.

Luong holds a Master's in engineering management from Santa Clara University and a Bachelor's in computer science from University of California, Berkeley. Luong is the author of the book, "Internationalization, Developing Software for the Global Market", published in 1995.

Colonel Daniel L. Scott is Assistant Commandant, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and Commander, Air Force Element, Presidio of Monterey, California. The colonel provides command, language instruction, course evaluation, school administration, and staff support to joint military and interagency civilian linguists critical to national security interests. 

Prior to accepting his assignment at the DLIFLC & POM, Colonel Scott was the Deputy Director of Intelligence, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, FL. He directed targeting during Operations ENDURING and IRAQI FREEDOM. Previously, he served as Chief of Targeting, U.S. Strategic Command and Deputy Chief of CINCSTRAT's Special Staff Group. He has also commanded RC-135 Rivet Joint operations at the 390th Intelligence Squadron (AIA), Kadena AB, Okinawa, Japan. Colonel Scott's experience includes a Joint Staff Tour where he was an Air Forces Analyst for the Joint Warfighting Assessment Division in the Directorate for Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment (J-8). 

Colonel Scott graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1979 and entered active duty as a Cryptologic Management Officer. He initially served in Rivet Joint operations with the Electronic Security Command in Okinawa. During DESERT SHIELD/STORM, Colonel Scott was the Operations Officer of the 6975th Electronic Security Squadron (Provisional) and responsible for RIVET JOINT, Communications Security, and Special Intelligence Support operations. Colonel Scott's staff experience includes long range planning at Headquarters, Electronic Security Command, Force Structure and Joint Warfighting Assessments on the Joint Staff, Strategy and policy at U.S. STRATCOM, and Chief Intelligence Support, National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC). He is a graduate of the National Security Agency's Junior Officer Cryptologic Career Program. Colonel Scott attended the University of Zaragoza, Spain, as an Olmsted Scholar and attended Air Command and Staff College as an exchange officer in Venezuela. He was also a National Defense Fellow at the University of Miami, Florida. Colonel Scott is a Foreign Area Officer for Russia and Latin America.

Charles Bigelow is the co-designer, with Kris Holmes, of the Lucida family of fonts, including Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, and Lucida Sans for Java, which incorporate multiple Unicode scripts and symbol sets. In the 1980's and 1990's he was a professor of digital typography at Stanford University, chairman of letterform research and education for the Association Typographique Internationale, associate editor of Fine Print, guest editor of Visible Language, and a regular contributor to typographic journals. He is currently Vice President of Bigelow & Holmes Inc.

Dr. Deborah Anderson is a researcher in the Dept. of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and runs the UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative (and its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project). She is the UC Berkeley representative to the Unicode Consortium, and serves as Liaison for the Linguistic Society of America. Having received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies, she also edits the UCLA Indo-European Studies Bulletin, and promotes the use of Unicode generally.

Scott Atwood is a software engineer at PayPal where he is currently working on the China localization project.

Doug Barbin is in charge of VeriSign's™ Compliance Solutions. A CPA, he has a strong background in internal controls, and has conducted regulatory compliance audits for many large companies. Doug started his career as a Forensic Accountant investigating embezzlement and bribery. He has worked on several high profile cases, including the Swiss Bank investigation into dormant accounts belonging to Holocaust survivors, and anti-corruption investigations at the World Bank. He then moved into the information security business, where he has used his investigative skills to help track down online fraudsters. Barbin now develops security services at VeriSign to help companies and individuals protect themselves online.

Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen, born 1965 in Bonn, Germany, studied Visual Communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. From 1993 to 2000, he lived and worked in Paris. First he collaborated with the Founders of Grapus, Gérard Paris-Clavel and Pierre Bernard, then he founded his own office. In 1998 he was awarded a grant from the French Centre National des Arts Plastiques for a typographic research project on the ASCII-Code. Lectured in Amiens, Beirut, Berlin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Prague, Rotterdam, Warsaw, and Weimar. He returned to Germany in 2000 and, since 2002, is Professor of Typography at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Since 2004, he is working on the decodeunicode.org project, which went online in April 2005. The project is supported by the Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Craig Cummings is a Principal Technical Staff member of Oracle's Applications Internationalization team. Since J2SE v1.3, Craig has worked closely with Sun's internationalization team to help shape some of the pluggable locale, resource bundle, font, and supplementary character support in Java.

Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications, including such areas as bi-directional text, normalization, scripts, text segmentation, identifiers (including IDN), collation, regular expressions, compression, locale data, character conversion, character properties, and security.

Mark was responsible for the overall architecture of ICU (the premier Unicode software library), and the earlier version of ICU that was incorporated into the standard Java release.

Marc Durdin was born in Sydney and moved with his family to South East Asia when he was a child. Marc became interested in finding a solution to foreign language input while he and his father were using Lao, and wrote the first version of Keyman in 1993, at 14 years of age. He completed a Bachelor of Computing at the University of Tasmania in 1999. He currently lives with his wife and 2-year-old daughter in Hobart, Tasmania.

Thomas Emerson is a Senior Software Architect at Basis Technology with over ten years of software engineering experience. He designed and implemented the low-level foundations of many of Basis Technology's Language Analysis products and now provides architectural and implementation support for the shared linguistic foundation. He is the primary developer for the Rosette Chinese and Korean Language Analyzers and the Rosette Chinese Script Converter, and is currently working on various Arabic-based projects. Tom studied cognitive linguistics and computer science at Clarkson University and German and computer science at the University of Vermont.

John Emmons has been involved in globalization efforts for IBM's AIX operating system for the last 17 years, serving as architect and technical lead for the last 10 years. He also contributes as a part-time member of IBM's ICU development team, and serves as a member of Unicode's CLDR technical committee, contributing the POSIX locale generation tools to that project. His major areas of expertise are in operating systems development, and complex text layout technologies.

Doug Felt is the technical lead of the ICU for Java project. As part of the Text and International team at Taligent and at the IBM Globalization Center of Competency in San Jose, he contributed to the development of the bidirectional text support in JDK 1.2 and in Swing. Doug worked on the original RichEdit control at Taligent, and ported the bidirectional text classes to JDK 1.1. Doug is a graduate of Stanford University.

Asmus Freytag, Ph.D. is president of ASMUS, Inc., a Seattle-based company specializing in consulting services and seminars on topics ranging from software internationalization to implementing Unicode.

He has been a contributor to the Unicode Standard since before the inception of the Unicode Consortium and a co-author of the Unicode Standard for many years. He has written or contributed to several Unicode Technical Reports and Standards. He is a vice-president of the Unicode Consortium and represents the Consortium in several standards groups such as NCITS/L2 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.

Mark Garrett is a support developer with ModernGigabyte LLC in Louisville, KY. In addition to QA and general bug squashing, Mark is otherwise known as the company "locale guy." He has been writing HTML since the time when multiple title and body tags were the "it" thing and has become moderately good at PHP scripting in the last five or so years. He currently lives in Louisville with his beautiful, talented wife.

Deborah Goldsmith is a software engineer within the International and Text department at Apple, and is Apple's liaison to the Unicode Consortium, the Unicode Technical Committee, and the CLDR Technical Committee (of which she is vice chair).

She has worked at Apple since 1986 on object-oriented applications frameworks and operating systems, the Mac OS toolbox, fonts, and international support. Part of that time was spent at Taligent, the Apple/IBM joint venture, where she was one of the system architects.

Andy Heninger is member of the ICU development team at IBM in San Jose, CA. where he has been responsible for the design and implementation of the regular expression and boundary analysis packages in the ICU library. Prior to joining the ICU group, he was the technical lead for development of the Xerces-C XML parser at IBM.

John Hudson was born in Bristol UK, in 1968, and spent his childhood in South Wales. He moved to Canada with his parents in 1978, and has resided in Vancouver ever since. Before becoming involved in type, he worked for a few years in the antiquarian book trade, and still spends more money than is sensible on books. He began designing type in the early 1990s, with the encouragement of Gerald Giampa of the Lanston Type Co., and in 1994 he established Tiro Typeworks with Ross Mills. Tiro specialises in custom font solutions for multilingual computing and publishing. Hudson has designed types for the Latin, Greek and Hebrew scripts, and has won awards for Cyrillic type design and his 'outstanding contribution to the development of Cyrillic typography and international typographic communications'. He has collaborated on the design of Arabic and Ethiopic typefaces.

Richard Ishida is the W3C Internationalization Activity Lead. This activity has the mission of ensuring universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture, by proposing & coordinating any techniques, conventions, guidelines and activities within the W3C that help to make and keep the Web international. Richard is also chair of the GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group.

For many years Richard's seminars and consulting have helped product groups around the world develop websites, documents, software, and on-screen information so that it can be easily localized for the international marketplace. His background includes translation and interpreting, computational linguistics, and translation tools. He has studied French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

Michael Kaplan is a Technical Lead at Microsoft, working on both Windows and the .NET Framework, centering on Collation, Keyboards, and Locales. He was the principal developer for both the MS Layer for Unicode on Win9x (MSLU) and the MS Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). He has written dozens of articles on international development issues and is the author of the book "Internationalization with Visual Basic" from Sams Publishing. He has also spoken at conferences around the world. Prior to joining Microsoft, he did consulting as the Chief Software Architect of Trigeminal Software, Inc. His blog gets new posts daily and can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap. 

Wunna Ko Ko is a Master Student at Nagaoka University of Technology. He had been working in a private exercise book manufacturing company as Manager from 1998 to 2004. He holds M.B.A from Institute of Economics (Yangon).

I've had a long, highly international career in many areas of ICT, in implementation, technical support, development, marketing and product management. Right now I'm the secretary of the Finnish national working group on cultural diversity issues in ICT (under the auspices of the ministry of education), and as such I'm the liaison from RILF to Unicode. I'm also a member of the European CEN/ISSS Cultural Diversity Steering Group. In Unicode, I'm involved in the CLDR activities.

Peter Linsley is the International Product Manager for Ask Jeeves' Search Engine. He has been working in the internationalization field for 9 years.

Steven R. Loomis is a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San Jose. His ICU contributions include the Locale Explorer demo. Steven joined Taligent in 1993, and has worked on networking, messaging and Web server frameworks. After discovering the world of internationalization during a temporary assignment to a bidirectional text project, he joined the International Components for Unicode team. His hobbies include Linux system administration and Maltese language advocacy.

Eric Mader is a member of the IBM Globalization Center of Competency in San Jose, CA where he works as part of the ICU team. His work on that team includes the ICU LayoutEngine, character set detection and text boundary analysis. Eric has worked on software internationalization since 1980, at Xerox, Apple Computer, Netscape, and IBM.

Marypat Meuli has worked at Microsoft for 11 years in a variety of roles in Program Management and Testing, helping both Office and Windows products meet the needs of customers worldwide.

Prof. Yoshiki Mikami joined the Ministry of International trade and Industry (MITI) in 1975. Has held senior positions in MITI such as Director for IT Standards, Director for New Visual Industry, Director for Information Policy and Director for Strategic Commodities Export Inspection. He worked in the JETRO Singapore Office 1994-1997. Since July 1997, he has been a Professor, Planning and Management Science at Nagaoka University of Technology. Born in Tokyo, he received a B.Eng (Mathematical Engineering) from Tokyo University in 1975.

Marin Millar is the Globalization Manager for the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation. Her team is responsible for the globalization of Visual Studio, which spans all of the programming languages produced at Microsoft and the .NET Framework.

Thomas Milo is the president of DecoType. Unlike any other player in this field, DecoType develops font technology that takes into the equation the Islamic calligraphic tradition and the requirements for both modern and classical Arabic orthography. DecoType has been working on Arabic script technology since 1982, in the course of which they pioneered the concept of Dynamic Font (Smart Font, Intelligent Font) DecoType has a close partnership with WinSoft, France.

Tom Milo served as a captain in the Royal Netherlands Army and did two tours of duty as an Arabic speaking officer in the United Nations Interim Force in South Lebanon as a member of a contingent of armoured infantry on peacekeeping duty. At the behest of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence, he wrote the Handbook of Lebanese Spoken Arabic for the Royal Netherlands Army (1981).

Has been involved with Unicode since 1988. Tom acts as a consultant for Basis Technology in Cambridge, MA, contributing to their Arabic and Persian Technology projects. He was given the honour three times of presenting the Keynote Address (IUC14 Boston, MA 1999, IUC15 San Jose, CA, 1999) and, directly following the dramatic events in September 2001, at IUC19. He hosted IUC16 in Amsterdam. Tom holds a Unicode Bulldog Award – whenever he remembers where he put it.

John O'Neil is a Language Technology Architect at Basis Technology and has worked at a number of companies in the areas of search engine technology, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing and text mining. He earned a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Harvard University, is the author of more than twenty papers in Computer Science and Linguistics, and has given talks at numerous professional conferences.

Liam Quin is the XML Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and also represents the W3C on the XML Query Working Group, where he is staff contact. Liam has worked with structural markup since the early 1980s. He graduated in Computer Science from Warwick University in England in 1984, and has worked in the fields of text processing and markup ever since. At SoftQuad Inc he was technical lead for HotMetaL, the first commercial HTML editor complete with accessibility features, and also for SoftQuad Panorama, an SGML viewer plugin for Web browsers. Liam Quin was heavily involved in the creation of XML, and has worked full-time at the W3C since 2001.

Russ Rolfe is the Lead Program Manager for the Windows Globalization Evangelism team. He is an advocate to Microsoft development teams for international customers, letting the teams know what Microsoft's customers' international issues and needs are. He headed the creation of Microsoft's book, "Developing International Software - 2nd. Edition." He has been involved with Globalization, Internationalization and Localization for over 25 years. He spent five years with Weidner Communications as project manager developing a Japanese to English machine translation system. He was one of founding members of the OSCAR group who created the Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) standard and is currently a member of the W3Cs International GEO (Guidelines, Education and Outreach) Task Force.

Dr. Murray Sargent III is a Senior Software Design Engineer at Microsoft, mostly working on the RichEdit editing engine. He worked for 22 years in the theory and application of lasers, first at Bell Labs and then as a Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. He has also worked on technical whitepapers, writing the first ever math display program (1969) and later (1980s) the PS technical word processor. He is the author of more than 100 publications in scientific journals and 6 books, 3 on laser physics and 3 on personal computers. He completed BS, MS, and PhD degrees in theoretical physics at Yale University.

Felix Sasaki works within the W3C Internationalization Activity, which assures that the needs of Internationalization are fulfilled within W3C-specifications, and also creates Internationalization specific specifications. Felix is the team contact for the W3C Internationalization Core Working Group and the ITS Working Group. He is used to crossing borders between cultures and (scientific) communities: He studied Japanese, Linguistics and Web technologies at various Universities in Germany and Japan. Now his mission is to address the needs of Internationalization and Localization within the W3C, applying different W3C technologies like RDF and XML for purposes of Internationalization and Localization, and introducing the merit of these technologies to a broad Internationalization and Localization community.

Markus Scherer is the current ICU team manager and a software engineer at IBM developing ICU and other Unicode/Globalization solutions. He has contributed to many parts of ICU including character conversion, bidi, normalization, Unicode properties and collation. After graduating from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany with a degree in computer science, he worked on projects for wireless and mobile computing with IBM. A strong interest in languages brought him into the Internationalization parts of the projects, followed by his current focus on Unicode and Globalization.

Michel Suignard is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation in the Windows globalization team. He is also a Unicode technical director and the project editor of ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO technical standard synchronized with the Unicode Standard. He has been the contact person in Microsoft for Internationalized Domain Name strategy and has worked with the various products team developing IDN solutions.

Ienup Sung has been working for Sun Microsystems, Inc. since 1992. In those years, he has been actively involved and has also led many Solaris internationalization projects. He also briefly worked for Oracle Corp. on RDBMS NLS issues at 1997. He represents Sun at the Unicode consortium. Prior to Sun, he worked at TriGem Computer, Inc. and Human Computers, Inc. at Korea as a technical lead on Korean computing issues.

He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and B.S. in Computer Science from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Korea.

Frank works for Google Inc. as software engineer since fall 2005. Frank spent the past 16 yeas developing global software. Before joining Google, Frank worked for AOL, Netscape, Apple Computer and III (Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan, ROC). In the last 10 years, Frank architected and led the Mozilla internationalization development and managed the Netscape Client International and Text Engineering team. Frank received his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University, Boston and College Graduate Diploma from Ming-Hsing Junior Engineering College, Taiwan, ROC. 

Tex Texin has been providing globalization services including architecture, strategy, training, and implementation to the software industry for many years. Tex has created numerous globalized products, managed internationalization development teams, developed internationalization and localization tools, and guided companies in taking business to new regional markets.

Tex is also an advocate for internationalization standards in software and on the Web. He is a representative to the Unicode Consortium and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Tex maintains two Web sites for internationalization, the popular http://www.I18nGuy.com and a site focused on the Progress Software community and others: http://www.XenCraft.com.

Tex is now Internationalization Architect for Yahoo!

Raghuram Viswanadha joined the ICU team in 2000. Since graduating from Indiana State University with an MS in Robotics and Computer Science, he has worked with projects at FedEx and Lotus in distributed learning management systems, and been associated with Lotus LearningSpace 4. His contributions in ICU include various character set converters, Indic transforms, StringPrep & IDNA implementation and tools for XLIFF support. He is also actively involved in Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project.

June Wang joined the PayPal Unicode project when it began in January 2003 and contributed to its success as the project lead. She currently works on the PayPal China project.

Vladimir Weinstein joined the ICU group at IBM in October 1999. He is the technical lead for ICU4C and works on various aspects of ICU including collation and resource bundle organization mechanisms. Vladimir holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, major Computer Science, and Systems Control from University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, where he previously worked as a teaching/research assistant. His interests include i18n, Unicode, object oriented design and natural language processing.

Pavol Zavarsky has lectured extensively in many countries, including U.S.A., U.K., Australia, Japan, Italy, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Brazil. He is actively collaborating with research groups in USA, Italy and Japan. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan and a M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from  Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.

Weiran Zhang is a Development Manager in Server Globalization Technology group at Oracle Corporation. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his B.S. with honors in Computer Science from State University of New York at Buffalo.