Unicode® Executive Officers

 

Directors | Executive Officers | Technical Committee Chairs | Staff | Org Chart

See also the list of Previous Unicode Officers and Staff.

	Ayman Aldahleh Secretary Ayman is the Group Engineering Manager of the Office Core Experiences team responsible for the shared components that Office use to build their applications, including UX, UI platform, text rendering and editing, font management and accessibility. Prior to this, Ayman managed different internationalization teams that built the globalization and localization platform for Office applications, including multilingual and machine translation features. Ayman started at Microsoft in 1990 as a software design engineer and worked on BiDirectional enabling of some of Microsoft key products including DOS, Windows, IE, Word and PowerPoint. Ayman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from University of Arizona.
	Toral Cowieson CEO   Toral Cowieson joined Unicode in 2021. More recently, she was the head of strategy and impact measurement at the Internet Society. She also held the leadership and learning portfolio, where her team set the vision and scaled online training and fellowship programs to reach NextGen leaders across 100 countries. Many of these technology and policy professionals are now contributing to the design, standards development, and governance of the core Internet infrastructure around the world. Toral’s prior experience includes leadership roles as a board advisor and across non-profits and corporations, including Thomson Reuters.
	Mark Davis CTO & Cofounder; CLDR-TC Chair Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications. Mark founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of ICU (the premier Unicode software internationalization library), and architected the core of the Java internationalization classes. He also founded and is the chair of the Unicode CLDR project, and is a co-author of BCP 47 "Tags for Identifying Languages" (RFC 4646 and RFC 4647), used for identifying languages in all XML and HTML documents. Since the start of 2006, Mark has been working on software internationalization at Google, focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), the software internationalization libraries (including ICU), and stable international identifiers.
	Anne Gundelfinger Vice President and General Counsel Anne is an experienced legal executive with 30 years in private practice and in-house legal roles. From 2013-2019 she served as vice president for global intellectual property for Swarovski, a global fashion jewelry brand based in central Europe. Before that she held various positions over a decade in the Intel legal department including vice president for global public policy, vice president for global sales & marketing legal affairs, and director of trademarks & brands.  Early in her career she was an associate at Fenwick & West and director of trademarks at Sun Microsystems. Since retiring from Swarovski, Anne has been a consultant and has served as a World Intellectual Property Organization domain name panelist under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy of ICANN. Anne has long been a leader in the global IP bar. She served on the Board of Directors of the International Trademark Association for nearly a decade and served as the Association’s president in 2005.  From 2006 to 2008 she served as chair of the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights.  She was one of the drafters of the U.S. Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006.  Anne has also long been a supporter of the Unicode Consortium and its work, providing pro bono IP counsel since the mid ‘90s.  She is also a proud Gold Sponsor of the Comma (U+002C) and the Trademark Symbol (U+2122).
	Iris Orriss Treasurer Iris Orriss serves as Vice President of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience Analytics at Meta. She has been with Meta since 2013 and is passionate about eliminating the internet language and cultural barriers and improving the overall user experience. Her work focuses on growing Meta in international markets. From 2012 – 2019 Iris was a member of the board at Translators without Borders, a nonprofit organization that provides vital information in the right language at the right time. Prior to Meta, Iris was a director at Microsoft working on product internationalization and development process in the enterprise and language technology divisions. She is a native of Germany, speaks four languages, and was educated at Freie Universität Berlin.
	Greg Welch VP of Marketing Greg Welch is retired Director of Strategic Marketing in Intel’s PC Client Group. Among his recent accomplishments has been responsibility for driving the formulation and coordination of Intel’s Ultrabook™ program. Previous positions at Intel include: Director, Intel’s Architecture Group, Global WIMAX Organization, responsible for business development relationships between Intel, Clearwire, Best Buy and OEMs to promote the world’s first national 4G network. As Director of Strategy and Industry Initiatives in Intel’s Software and Solutions Group, Greg drove Intel’s efforts to enable software for multi-core architectures. Director of Strategic Planning for Intel's Mobile Platforms Group. Greg oversaw long-range roadmap planning and business strategy for all notebook platform, processor, and chipset products that became the Core® family of processors. Director of Brand Strategy. Greg spearheaded the segmentation of Intel’s processor brands including the Itanium® and Xeon® brands for high-end server products, and the Celeron® brand for value PCs.

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