Former Unicode® Leadership and Staff

Glenn Adams has been involved in the design of character encoding and international text layout systems since 1988, when he worked on support for Arabic, Thai, and Japanese on the Symbolics Lisp Machine. In 1997, he co-authored RFC 2070, laying a path for the internationalization of HTML. More recently, he has served as the editor for the W3C Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) specifications, which recently added support for Japanese typography in subtitles and closed captions.

Ms. Joan Aliprand has been an international advocate for the use of Unicode in libraries since 1993. She had a leading role in revision of the MARC 21 specifications for library data to utilize Unicode. She also served on an American Library Association task force on access to library resources in languages other than English. Joan’s education includes a B.Sc. in Botany from the University of Sydney, a Diploma in Librarianship from the University of New South Wales, and coursework at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago. She has worked as a cataloger at Macquarie University and the University of Chicago, as a library analyst at the University of California at Berkeley, and as a senior analyst at RLG. Ms. Aliprand was made Technical Director in 1993, and was then appointed Secretary of the Unicode Consortium from January 1994 until December 2006 when she decided to retire.

Julie Allen has been involved with the Unicode Standard since Version 2.1, writing, editing and managing various projects for the Consortium. During 2021 she served as chair of the Public Relations Committee. She earned a Ph.D. in Germanics from the University of Washington and an undergraduate degree in English and German from the University of Michigan. She worked hard to translate long convoluted sentences into clear, precise prose and to keep group projects moving forward on schedule.

Dr. Joseph Becker was Principal Scientist at Xerox Document Management Systems Division, having previously managed the Workstation Software International Group. He earned a BS in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1970. After joining Xerox PARC in 1977, he led efforts to bring Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and other language capabilities to the Xerox Star/Viewpoint/GlobalView series of office system products. He is one of the founders of the Unicode Standard effort. His Erdős number is 2.

Dr. Lee Collins is currently "Manager, OS Engineering Asia" at Apple Computer, Inc. He received a BA in Oriental Languages from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974, an MA in East Asian Languages from Columbia University in 1978, and has studied at the Tokyo Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in 1978, the Tokyo University Department of Chinese Literature in 1979, and in the University of California Political Science Ph.D. program in 1980. In 1982, Mr. Collins became Senior Researcher at the International Energy Forum in Tokyo. A self-taught programmer, he joined Xerox Corporation in 1984 to develop his long-standing interest in multilingual software by working on Chinese and Korean versions of the Xerox STAR and 6085. Mr. Collins joined Apple Computer, Inc. in 1988 where he contributed to the Unicode Standard as a member of Apple's "Pink" project. Mr. Collins is one of the original founders of the Unicode Standard.

Dr. Asmus Freytag is President of ASMUS, Inc., a Seattle-based company specializing in consulting services and seminars on software globalization and implementing the Unicode standard to companies world-wide. Prior to his current work, he was at Microsoft, among other responsibilities as internationalization architect for the first version of Windows NT and as globalization evangelist. He has also written several articles on character sets and internationalization for Microsoft Systems Journal. He has been a member of the Unicode Technical Committee working group since early 1990 and was a Unicode Technical Director from 1991 to June 1992 at which time he was elected Unicode’s Vice President of Marketing. Dr. Freytag is also a member of ASCENT’s Board of Directors since 1995. He holds Ph.D. and MS degrees in Physics from the University of Illinois.

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 was 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.

Mr. Michael Kernaghan started working on the Unicode Standard in January of 1989 and became its first Vice President when the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in 1991. Later in 1996, he also took on the role of treasurer. Michael works at Microsoft Corporation in the Graphics Products Unit as a senior engineer, internationalizing their software for Windows and the Macintosh. He joined the Macintosh development group in 1997 as a lead developer in Text and I18N. He has a BS in Computer Science and Statistics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1974. He worked at Control Data Corporation for five years providing real-time operating systems for large main-frame customers. In 1979, he moved to Diablo Systems performing 8080 programming on desktop PCs. After two years, he joined the Xerox team producing the STAR Workstation, first as programmer, and later on as a manager of a number of its desktop applications. In 1988, Mike was hired as the manager of Multilingual Development at Metaphor to address the need to change Metaphor products to be offered in the international market place.

Mike Ksar has been working in the IT industry for over 45 years. He worked for Microsoft for more than five years in the Corporate Standards Strategy team and later as a senior program manager in the Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technology (GIFT) team. Before joining Microsoft, Mike worked at HP for more than 24 years. In his last assignment at HP, he was the Corporate Globalization Manager. 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.

Mike was the Convener of the ISO technical working group (JTC1/SC2/WG2) that developed and published ISO/IEC 10646, from April 1990 to 2014. He served 6 years as member of the Unicode Consortium Board of Directors. 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.

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.

Jennifer 8. Lee is the founder of Emojination, a grassroots group whose motto is “Emoji by The People, For the People” which played a role in passing the hijab and dumpling emojis. She is also the founder of Emojicon, a conference celebrating all things emoji. She is the co-founder and CEO of Plympton, a San Francisco-based literary studio that innovates in digital publishing. A former New York Times reporter, Jenny is a producer of “The Search for General Tso,” and and the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Jenny also serves on the boards for the Nieman Foundation, the Center for Public Integrity, the Digital Public Library of America, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hacks/Hackers, as well as committees for the New York Public Library Young Lions committee, the Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards, and SXSW programming. Jenny has served as the lead judge for the Knight News Challenge, and on the launch team for Upworthy. Jenny graduated with a degree in Applied Math and Economics from Harvard, where she was vice president of The Harvard Crimson.

Kristi Lee was CLDR technical committee vice-chair until 2021 and represented Microsoft in the CLDR technical committee. She joined Microsoft in 1997 and worked in number of different divisions and product development groups. Her focus has been delivering solutions to international customers in localization and internationalization. She holds a mathematics degree from University of Washington.

With administrative experience in a variety of industries and settings, including corporate and non-profit organizations, Ellen served as the Consortium's Officer Manager for many years. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Masters in Business Administration.

During his tenure at Mozilla as a software and localization engineer, Staś drove the localization effort of Firefox and other Mozilla projects, and developed tooling and infrastructure for the open-source community of translators. He co-designed and then led Project Fluent, a localization system for expressive translations, and contributed to ECMA 402. Today Staś is a TL/M on Google Cloud. He continues to be involved in Unicode's Message Format Working Group.

Daniel Minor is a staff software engineer in the platform internationalization group at Mozilla, and has contributed to the Unicode ICU4X and Message Format projects.

Lisa Moore worked for IBM for 35 years where she contributed to early LAN networking architecture and development, and then moved to the field of internationalization and managed the globalization of IBM's Analytics Platform products while representing IBM at the Unicode Consortium. In the broader IT industry, Lisa has contributed actively to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard since 1993 and has been an editor of the Unicode Standard since Version 2, where her work continues. She was a Vice President of the Unicode Consortium from 1996 until 2021, including eight years of service as CFO until 2020. She served as chair of the Unicode Technical Committee and vice-chair of the INCITS L2 Committee (US National Standards Body Character Encoding Committee) from 1999 until 2021, ably managing the technical agenda of the Unicode Standard's decision-making body. She chaired or co-chaired International Unicode Conferences from 1995 through 2005, running the conference program committee. Lisa has been an invited keynote speaker or panelist at groups as diverse as the LRC 2006, GK3 2007, the International Telugu Internet Conference 2011, the 14th International Conference on Tamil Language Computing 2015,and at the University of Inner Mongolia 2018.

Lisa participated on the program committee of the Conference on Human Language Technology for Development 2011 (HLTD2011), and was on the editorial board of Localization Focus for many years. From February 2012 until October 2020, she was Chief Financial Officer of the Unicode Consortium. Lisa also organized the Unicode Oman Workshop in Muscat, Oman, 2016, the Mongolian Working Group Meeting #2 in San Jose, CA, 2018, and the Mongolian Working Group Meeting #3 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 2019.

Eric Muller is a software engineer with Adobe Systems, where he works primarily on text layout and font technologies. He has represented Adobe Systems to the Unicode Consortium since May 2000, and served as the chair of INCITS/L2 from 2006-2011. Prior to Adobe Systems, Eric worked for Mainsoft, Digital Equipement (at the Systems Research Center) and Schlumberger (EPS). He holds an M. Sc. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Engineering degree from ESIEE (Paris).

Eric was a Technical Director of the Unicode Consortium from 2005-2007, then a Vice President until 2012.

Kherishma was a project manager and budget coordinator at Apple. She holds a B.S. in Actuarial Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

David Singer is the senior engineer who coordinates standards activity for software engineering at Apple. In this role, he serves directly in both technical roles (multimedia systems at MPEG and 3GPP) and strategic roles (Advisory Committee and Advisory Board at the W3C, past Blu-ray Director), and indirectly oversees Apple’s involvement in a wide range of standards bodies and consortia, including ITU-T and ITU-R, SMPTE, and INCITS. David holds a BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, England.

Yoshito Umaoka is a software globalization engineer at IBM. He has worked on globalization issues in various software products including Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal Server. He previously served as vice-chair of the ICU Technical Committee and as the project lead of ICU4J.

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.

Intimately familiar with the problems of supporting languages with “strange characters” through his work as internationalization evangelist in Unisys and its predecessors, Arnold became active in Unicode, INCITS/L2, and JTC1 SC22/WG20 when he moved to the USA. In all his positions (IR, vice-chair and chair of INCITS/L2, convenor of SC22/WG20, and vice-chair of the UTC) he promoted the close cooperation of the Unicode Consortium with the formal national and international standards organizations, thus ensuring that relevant international standards were based on and compatible with The Unicode Standard. Arnold was involved in the development and editing of major ISO standards for internationalization and character set technology. He retired end of 2004 and now has the time to enjoy his hobby–digital photography.