Unicode® Technical Group Leadership

Dr. Deborah Anderson joined the Unicode Consortium as a technical director in 2007. Prior to that, she was involved in the Unicode effort as an invited expert, then as UC Berkeley's representative to the Unicode Consortium since 2005. Deborah is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and runs its Script Encoding Initiative (and runs its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project). She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies.She is Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.

Annemarie is a program manager on Android at Google. She holds a B.A. in linguistics and Dutch studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Robert is a Software Engineer at Google, where he has been on the internationalization team, working on ICU4X, since 2021. He is enthusiastic about languages, both natural and programming, and holds BA and MSc degrees in Computer Science from the University of Oxford.

Zibi Braniecki is a Sr. Staff Platform Engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox Platform architecture. In this role Zibi is a peer of the internationalization module at Mozilla, a co-author of the Fluent Localization System and represents Mozilla at TC39 committee focusing on ECMA402.

Shane Carr is a Senior Software Engineer on Google's i18n Engineering team. He is chair of the ECMA 402 subcommittee for JavaScript i18n standards and is a core contributor to the International Components for Unicode (ICU) project. His work on ICU has focused on locale data, number formatting, and performance optimization.

Shane has previously presented on Zawgyi and on ICU number formatting at the 41st and 42nd Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC). He has also presented at the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He holds an MS and BS in Computer Science and BS in Chemical Engineering summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis.

Eiso Chan (陈永聪) was born in the actual “Cat’s Cradle” (the former geographic name of Quảng Châu Loan during the French Indochina period), majored in Chinese dialectology and linguistics in the university, and currently works at the Culture and Art Publishing House (文化艺术出版社) in Beijing, China. His interests include the Unicode Standard and typographic issues that affect various living and historical scripts used in East and Southeast Asia.

Nebojša Ćirić is a TL/M of internationalization team at Google and vice-chair of the ICU4X Subcommittee. He is one of the founders and ex-chair of JavaScript i18n standard - Ecma402, which is a main driver of i18n on the Web. His personal i18n goal is to make Slavic languages better supported in standards and libraries. He holds B.S. degree from School of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia and M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Florida.

Peter Constable is a Technical Vice President and the Chair of the UTC. Since 2003, Peter has worked for Microsoft on various projects related to Unicode, internationalization, text display and fonts. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008 and later served as Treasurer.

Craig Cummings has been working in the field of software globalization for over 30 years. He has worked at Amazon, VMware, Yahoo!, Oracle, and a few other companies – working across many technologies including software virtualization, big data, games, and consumer and enterprise products.

Craig has been serving as Chair of the ANSI/INCITS Character Sets and Internationalization Committee -- and in a dual role as Unicode Technical Committee Vice Chair -- for nearly 12 years. Since 2018, Craig has been working with indigenous language communities to improve support for these languages on computers and mobile devices.

Jennifer Daniel is the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee chair. Her first contribution to Unicode was standardizing gender inclusive representations in emoji. As a designer, author and former graphics editor at the New York Times, she now explores communication and messaging through verbal, written, auditory and visual expression at a small ad company called Google. Jennifer is a co-author and illustrator of a number of graphics books including How to Be Human, Space!, and the Origins of Almost Everything. Her work has been recognized by the Walker Art Museum, Society of Illustrators and published in the New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine to name a few. She has had the honor to serve as a judge for the Society of News Design, Online News Association, Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Data is Beautiful and the Art Director's Club. She lives in Berkeley California but also in cyberspace.

Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project. He was the president of the Unicode Consortium from its incorporation in 1991 until the end of 2022, and has presided over the board of directors since incorporation. Having held positions at IBM and Apple, Mark joined Google in 2006 where he has been working on software internationalization 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.

Rich Gillam has been working on software internationalization for more than 25 years, including stints with IBM, Amazon, and Apple. He’s currently a software engineer at Apple, where he works on the internationalization frameworks in macOS and iOS, including ICU, a project he’s been associated with off and on since its inception in 1998. He is the author of “Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer’s Guide to the Encoding Standard” and holds a bachelor’s degree in percussion performance from the Eastman School of Music.

Dr. Andrew Glass is Principal Product Manager in the Experiences and Devices Group at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 2008 he has specialized in font rendering, keyboards, and input-related user experiences. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies. He is co-editor of “A Dictionary of Gāndhārī” (gandhari.org, 2002–) and author of “Four Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras” (University of Washington Press, 2007). His contributions to Unicode include proposals for the Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts, and Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls. Andrew is the author and maintainer of Microsoft's Universal Shaping Engine specification. Prior to joining Microsoft, he taught at the University of Washington, University of Leiden, and Bukkyō University in Japan.

Fraser is the chair of the Text Terminal Working Group. He is also a member of the ISO C++ committee, where most of his time is spent in the SG16 Unicode study group. His day job is with Dejero Labs, where he works on video broadcast technologies, and previously worked on adding Unicode support to the LiveCode programming language.

Manish Goregaokar is fascinated by the richness of human writing systems and finds Unicode to be a constant source of unique, interesting challenges around them. He works as a software engineer on Google’s internationalization team, where he is helping build a next-generation, modular internationalization library called ICU4X as a part of Unicode. He is also involved in the Rust open source project, focusing on developer tooling.

Josh has spent the entirety of his 25+ year career working with fonts, text, tools, processes, and related standards, including Unicode since its early days. He has presented talks and tutorials at several Internationalization & Unicode Conferences about fonts and related topics. He is currently a Senior Computer Scientist at Adobe, where he develops and maintains open source and other font tools.

Ned Holbrook is a typographic engineer at Apple, specializing in text layout and fonts. He was one of the participants in the industrywide effort to standardize variable font technology in OpenType. He previously worked on wireless networking, virtualization, digital audio, embedded graphics, and remote filesystems.

Dr. Jan Kučera is a researcher at Newcastle University, where he received Ph.D. degree in Human-Computer Interaction, and he holds M.Sc. degree in Computer Graphics and M.A. degree in Indian Studies from Charles University in Prague. He joined Unicode and the Script Ad Hoc Group in 2014, with special interest in the scripts of south Asia. He is the author of kbdlayout.info website mapping keyboard layouts in Windows, as well as the advanced text rendering engine for .NET Micro Framework. He regularly contributes to the Microsoft's DirectWrite shaping engine.

Liang Hai (梁海) has been contributing to the Unicode Standard since 2016. His work focuses on improving both text encoding and font shaping for complexly encoded modern scripts, such as the major Indic ones and Mongolian. As a regular participant in the Script Ad Hoc Group, the Editorial Committee, and the UTC meetings, he is involved in both technical discussions and standard text editing. Since 2021, he has been the Multilingual Font Technologist and the “Unicode guy” at Typotheque.

Steven R. Loomis is the owner of Code Hive Tx, LLC, a software consultancy focussing on globalization enablement. He was with IBM’s corporate globalization group for 22 years where he worked on translation workflow modernization, assisted with the formation of the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project, and served as IBM’s Technical Lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C). He continues to work on CLDR’s Survey Tool and other tools and processes, work on the updated CLDR Keyboard specification, and work in SIL Keyman to implement the same CLDR specification.

Dr Ken Lunde has been a Font Developer at Apple since 2021, and serves as one of Apple’s alternate representatives to the Unicode Consortium. He worked at Adobe from 1991 until 2019 where he specialized in East Asian type development, along with the development of related standards and specifications. His more notable accomplishments include the architecting and development of the Adobe-branded “Source Han” and Google-branded “Noto CJK” open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019; authoring and typesetting “CJKV Information Processing” Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009); and publishing over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison; served as Adobe’s primary representative to the Unicode Consortium from 2015 until 2019; serves as the IVD Registrar; participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee; attends UTC and IRG meetings; serves as the Unicode Consortium’s liaison to CESI, CITPC, SAT, and VNPF; received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award; was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 until 2020; became a Vice Chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in 2019; authored UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020; and became the Chair of Unicode CJK & Unihan Group in 2021. Ken and his wife enjoy driving their “His & Hers” pair of Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Mike is a Software Architect and Director of Globalization Engineering at Square (a division of Block, Inc.) and is responsible for next generation globalization frameworks. Mike has over three decades of internationalization and standards experience and has a background in global user experience design, application design, social games, systems engineering, database internals, and ethnographic research. Before Square, Mike has held globalization leadership positions at PayPal, Zynga, Yahoo! (now OAuth), CommerceOne, and Sybase (now part of SAP), as well as consulting for several Fortune 500 companies. Mike is the chair of the CLDR Person Group subcommittee.

Louka Ménard Blondin serves as the Chair of the Unicode Editorial Committee. His tenure at Synapse Softworks LLC as COO for eight years entailed managing day-to-day operations, recruitment and contracting, intelligence gathering, and business strategy. Prior to his current role, he was the lead engineer and CTO of Aedifice, a vertical SaaS provider in eastern Canada for construction companies, until its acquisition in 2023. Louka joined Unicode in Winter 2023, was appointed to the Editorial Committee in Spring, and became Chair shortly after, where he is currently focused on refining the committee's structure and processes.

Addison Phillips is the new Chair of the Message Formatting Working Group. Addison is also the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group and an active participant in the creation of internationalization standards such as Unicode. He is a co-author of IETF BCP 47, which is the standard for language and locale identifiers.

Roozbeh Pournader has been working on internationalization, standardization, open source, and digital typography since 1994, when he was in high school. He started his internationalization career by adding Persian support to TeX. While studying Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, he founded and led the FarsiWeb Project that introduced and evangelized internationalization, Unicode, and open source in Iran. At FarsiWeb, Roozbeh led the development of two national standards, on information interchange (ISIRI 6219) and keyboard input (ISIRI 9147), which helped transition Persian users from old character sets to Unicode.

Roozbeh received the Gold Medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 1996, founded the Persian Wikipedia in 2003, and received the Unicode Bulldog Award in 2009 for his contributions to Unicode’s support for complex scripts. Since moving to the US, he has worked as an Internationalization Engineer at HighTech Passport, Google (working on Noto, bidi, Android internationalization, and Google Fonts), and Facebook. He has been WhatsApp’s Internationalization Lead at Facebook from early 2018.

Roozbeh has been formally representing various organizations to the Unicode Consortium, including High Council of Informatics (2000–2008), HighTech Passport (2009–2011), Google (2011–2018), and Facebook (2018–present). He is also the Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.

David joined SIL in 1985. He is currently part of SIL's Writing Systems Technology team.

Markus Scherer is a member of the Google software internationalization team, focusing on the effective use of Unicode and on the development and deployment of cross-product internationalization libraries. Previously, he was manager, tech lead and software engineer at IBM. He has been a major contributor to ICU since 1999 and designed and developed significant portions of the character conversion, bidi, normalization, Unicode properties, and collation functionality. Markus is an alumnus of the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Michel Suignard is a Unicode Fellow. He served as Secretary for the Unicode Consortium from 2007 to 2020. He worked for more than twenty-five years at Microsoft, where he held various positions in the development and sales divisions, many involving development of the Unicode Standard. He is currently an independent consultant working on character encoding related matters, such as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and typography. Michel is the code chart editor for the Unicode Standard and is also the project editor of ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO standard aligned with the Unicode Standard.

Dr. Ken Whistler formerly worked at SAP in database software, implementing Unicode in database-related products and prior to that at Metaphor, Inc., where he helped design and implement the Unicode-based internationalization of the Metaphor Data Interpretation Systems. He has a BA in Chinese from Stanford University, 1972 and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He pursued an early career in Sinology, learning both Japanese and Chinese in the course of studying in Japan and in Taiwan. His graduate work focused on the Native American languages of California, including an extended period of field work, archival work, and lexicography. He has developed and marketed text analysis software for linguists.