Georges Van Den Abbeele has been Dean of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz since July 2006. Van Den Abbeele is a scholar of French literature and philosophy with a wide expertise in public humanities programs and education.
Van Den Abbeele has also served as president of the Western Humanities Alliance, a growing consortium of 23 West Coast universities, since he was elected in 1999. Prior to working at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Van Den Abbeele was a professor of French and Italian on the UC Davis faculty and was chair of the university's Department of French and Italian between 1997 and 2001. Both before (1993-97) and after (2000 to 2006) his chair appointment, he also served as the director of the Humanities Program at Davis.

Van Den Abbeele earned his B.A. from Reed College in 1976, and his Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1981. He began his academic career at UCSC, when he was appointed as visiting assistant professor of literature in 1981, and was promoted to associate professor in 1985. He joined the faculty at Ohio's Miami University in 1986, before accepting an appointment in 1991 as associate professor at UC Davis.
Van Den Abbeele has published more than 35 scholarly articles and has guest-edited several recent special issues of scholarly journals related to public policy and humanities education. He is the author of Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), and currently has two new books in progress: The Retreat of the French Intellectual and The Children of Belgium: Myths of Failed National Identity. Van Den Abbeele is also coeditor of 2003's A World of Fables, a collection of traditional fables spanning the globe, and French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race. He recently received the Blaise Pascal Medal in Social Sciences from the European Academy of Sciences, of which he is also an elected member.

Presenters:

Tero Aalto, the secretary of WS/MEEK, is a language technologist by education, and works at CSC, the Finnish IT Centre for Science. He is the administrator of the Language Bank of Finland, a national service for language research. He is also the new coordinator of the national localization project, Kotoistus.

Adil Allawi has been working in the field of multilingual computing for the past 20 years. He started with writing bilingual software for one of the first implementations of Arabic on a personal computer and has continued into the fields of word-processing, desktop publishing, and text rendering on small devices. Adil largest project was rewriting a high-end DTP application first to handle both Arabic and English and later to work with all international languages. Adil is the Technical Director and lead engineer of Diwan Software Limited.

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.

Shaloo Chaudhary is an International Program Manager in the Global Product Development group at Microsoft Corporation. She is currently driving the international versions of Windows Live Agents and Windows Live Alerts. In this role, she has driven the internationalization of these services and created internationalization solutions of Windows Live Agents using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Previous to this role she worked as a Program manager in Windows division. She was responsible for creating servicing solutions for releases like Windows Unified storage server SKU and Windows Internet Explorer. Previous to Microsoft, she spent eight years in the storage Industry as an engineer in VERITAS Software where she obtained a Patent (Storage Services and systems – US PATENT 70436144). She holds a Distinction in Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Sciences).

Dr. Richard Cook is a researcher in linguistics at UC Berkeley <http://stedt.berkeley.edu> and at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. He is an editor of Unicode 5.0, contributor to the Script Encoding Initiative, and author of the recent book Classical Chinese Combinatorics. He is co-author of the Character Description Language (CDL) Specification <http://www.wenlin.com/cdl/>.

Craig Cummings is an Internationalization Architect at Yahoo! Inc., where he helps set internal standards, participates with the Unicode Consortium, and helps drive corporate technical strategy for internationalization. In past lives, Craig was a key 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.

Douglas Davidson has worked on Mac OS X and its predecessors at NeXT and Apple since 1996. He is currently responsible for significant portions of the Mac OS X subsystems dealing with localization and text.

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 4646), 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.

Jim DeLaHunt is a Vancouver, Canada-based software engineer and consultant in world-ready business and technology development. He helps businesses serve culturally diverse markets through multilingual websites. He also writes, teaches, and develops software. Earlier, he worked 16 years in Silicon Valley for Adobe Systems. Jim is a licensed pilot, and has sung tenor with Opera San José. You can contact Jim at http://jdlh.com/.

Martin J. Dürst is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Information Technology at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. Martin has been one of the main drivers of internationalization and the use of Unicode in a Web and Internet context. He published the first proposals for domain name ‘Internationalzation’ and composite character normalization, and is the main author of the W3C Character Model and the IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier) specification. Since last year, he has also been contributing to the Ruby implementation, mostly in the area of internationalization.

John Emmons has been involved in IBM's globalization efforts for the last 18 years. He has served as the lead globalization architect for IBM's AIX operating system, and also contributes as a member of IBM's ICU development team, and serves as IBM's representative of Unicode's CLDR technical committee. His major areas of expertise are in operating systems development, and complex text layout technologies.

Mr. Gisle Forseth, educated at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. Has worked with internationalization of software programming tools since 1990. Since 1998 he has worked on the COBOL development tools from Acucorp, Inc. San Diego, California, USA. 

John Harvey is a senior engineer in the OS Engineering Asia group at Apple. He has experience with development of a wide variety of technologies and has been the key contributor to a number of system components to support internationalization, notably the Text Services Manager and the Multilingual Text Editor.

Andy Heninger is a member of the Internationalization team at Google and an active contributor to the ICU Unicode Library, most recently adding services for Unicode Spoofing detection. He is also responsible for the design and implementation of the regular expression and boundary analysis packages in the library, and serves as the editor of the Unicode Line Breaking specification, UAX-14.

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 developer at Microsoft, working on identifying and closing gaps in globalization support throughout the company. He previously worked in 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. Prior to joining Microsoft, he did consulting as the Chief Software Architect of Trigeminal Software. His blog gets new posts daily and can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap.

Wunna Ko Ko is now serving as a project leader (volunteer) in Burmese Language Project of OpenOffice.org. He is also serving as a project leader (volunteer) in Burmese Language Project of OpenSUSE. He participated in Myanmar National Corpus development. He got Master Degree from Nagaoka University of Technology, Japan. He participated in Language Observatory Project while he was studying for Master Degree. He also worked in a family-owned stationary business before he continued his studies in Japan. 

E.I. Kolehmainen, a citizen and resident of Finland, has an international technical, marketing and product management background in the IT industry since the 60’s. More recently, he has been involved in various standards activities at the national, European, and global levels. At CEN he is currently active in the Cultural Diversity Focus Group and as the Chair of the Workshop on Functional Multilingual Extensions to European Keyboard Layouts (WS/MEEK), at Unicode he is involved in the CLDR TC, and at JTC1 he has most recently been involved in SC2/WG2.

Shanjian Li is a Google software engineer. He was born in China and studied computer science in Beijing.  Shanjian has exposure to many I18n issues, including encoding detection and conversion, IME, font rendering, text layout.  He shares the vision that GWT is one way to bring web application programming from messy hacking arts back to software engineering.  He helped the team develop a global vision in order to "do the right thing" from the outset.  Shanjian's experience in Beijing has left him with a sense of obligation to facilitate free information exchange, guided both by technology and conscience.  One of his guiding principles is "to cultivate oneself, to harmonize the family, to make peace with the world."

Steven R. Loomis is a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San Jose, where he is the Technical Lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C). His ICU contributions include the Locale Explorer demo and the CLDR Survey Tool. After discovering the world of internationalization during a temporary assignment to a bidirectional text project, he joined the ICU team in 1998. His hobbies include Linux system administration and Maltese language advocacy.

Ken Lunde has been working for Adobe Systems Incorporated, headquartered in San Jose, California, for over seventeen years, and is currently a Senior Computer Scientist in CJKV Type Development. He is currently putting the finishing touches on "CJKV Information Processing" Second Edition, which is expected to be published at the end of 2008.

Eric Mader is a member of the ICU team in IBM's Globalization Center of Competency. He has worked in the field of globalization for the last twenty seven years and has worked on various aspects of complex text for the last twenty.

Michael was born in Portland, raised in southern Italy around the city of Lecce, and moved back to Oregon in ’97 to complete his higher education studies (International Business and Marketing). He spent most of his professional career at Intel, approximately 5 years, as a Quality Assurance lead for the localization of server management software products. In recent times, he transitioned to a localization Project Manager role, still focusing on some of the more technical aspects of the localization process.

Michael is a specialist in globalization of applications and distributed systems with over one and a half decades of internationalization experience. He is a licensed professional engineer with extensive experience consulting or leading globalization projects for a number Fortune 500 companies and has a background in global e-commerce, application design, database internals, distributed bibliographic systems, test engineering, and ethnographic research. He is currently leading the I18n Architecture team at Yahoo! Inc.

Kat joined Netscape in 1996, where he initially worked as I18n Evangelist, then as Principal I18n Software QA Engineer and as Mozilla Technology Evangelist. Since joining Google in 2005, he has been working as an I18n Consultant and Test Engineer for a variety of web applications. He has presented papers at W3C and Unicode Conferences as well as other Industry conferences in Japan and the US.

Jeffrey D. Oldham works with Google's International Engineering Team, on Google's Ads system, with the Google Economics Team, and with the Google Logs Team to ensure Google serves commercial information throughout the world. Prior to joining Google, he worked in private industry, as a professor, and as a researcher.

Don Osborn is Director of Bisharat, a language, technology and development initiative he founded in 2000. He is also an expert in rural development with extensive experience in West Africa.

Michael Ow has been a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San Jose since early 2006, where he is a software engineer for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C) and for Java (ICU4J). He works on various aspects of ICU including collation, character conversion, and taking care of the external ICU server. Michael holds a B.A. in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz.

Addison Phillips is a Globalization Architect for Lab126, the Amazon.com subsidiary that created the Kindle e-book.  He is also the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group, co-author of IETF BCP47 (language tags), a member of the IUC Program Review Committee and the Internationalization and Unicode Conference Advisory Committee. Mr. Phillips has been involved with internationalization since 1991. He has been an internationalization consultant and worked as a globalization architect at companies such as AT&T, webMethods, Quest Software and Yahoo!

Poornima Priyadarshini is a Program Manager in the Windows International Globalization Services team at Microsoft. She drives core language enablement support, National language support data, core API's and language roadmap intiative to expand into new languages and markets to meet the need of customers worldwide.

George Rhoten is a software engineer in the Tivoli division of IBM in San Jose. He worked for about 8 years on the International Components for Unicode (ICU) project at IBM, and he was a technical committee member of the CLDR project. George has many years of expertise in software internationalization, code pages, encodings, charsets, formatting,
parsing, historical currencies, CLDR, Unicode and ICU in general. He also has an interest in security and data management.

George holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a minor in Theater from Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo.

Kunihiro Sato is a senior student at the Department of Integrated Information Technology at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. His interests include programming and animation production.

Hisami Scott is an International Test Engineer in the Global Product Development group at Microsoft Corporation. She is currently driving the international testing of Windows Live Agents and Windows Live Alerts products. Previous to this role, she was the main contributor to the Japanese version of the language libraries for the Windows Live Agents product. Before Microsoft, she was a quality assurance engineer for the Dreamweaver product for more than six years at Macromedia, Inc. She holds a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specializing in Educational Measurement and Statistics, with multidisciplinary certification in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education.

Shawn Steele is a Senior Software Design Engineer at Microsoft working on Windows, the .NET Framework, and Silverlight.  He is primarily responsible for culture/locale data (naDev tlhInganpu' tu'lu', Qapla'!), character and sorting data, code pages/encodings, normalization, and IDN.  Shawn blogs at blogs.msdn.com/shawnste.

B-Tech in Electronics and communication from the University of Kerala.  Worked in areas of Power Electronics and Underwater Electronics.  For the last 8 years working in Language Technology.  Presently heading the Language Technology Section of C-DAC, Thiruvananthapuram and working in projects on English-Malayalam Machine aided translation, Malayalam OCR and Embedded TTS. 

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: http://www.XenCraft.com. Tex is now a technical director for NetApp.

Michael B. Toth has been the Program Manager and systems integrator for the Archimedes Palimpsest Program since 1999. Mr. Toth is an independent consultant with R.B.Toth Associates, which provides international strategic services for organizations seeking to structure appropriate and practical responses to complex issues. He provides systems integration and strategic planning for major technical efforts and for the study, preservation and display of cultural objects by museums and libraries. Mr. Toth brings extensive US Government experience with his work on space systems and subsystems. He currently also manages the integration of a range of US Government information systems and databases.

Yoshito Umaoka is a software engineer at IBM, where he has worked on globalization issues in various software products including Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal Server. He currently works for ICU project as the project lead of ICU4J.

Kirti Velankar is a senior software engineer at Yahoo Inc. She is a part of the internationalization engineering group working on the internationalization libraries , backend platform work on worldwide Yahoo products and has contributed to the PHP 5 development with open source project with Zend Technologies. She has extensive experience in Object Oriented design and development in Java/J2EE. Prior to Yahoo, she was at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chris Weber co-founded Casaba Security who focuses on security testing for some of the world's leading software development companies and online properties. He has authored several security books, articles and presentations. He has worked as a security researcher and consultant for seven years and has identified hundreds of security vulnerabilities in many widely used software products.

Cory grew up in the backwoods of New Hampshire. After attending college in Portland, Oregon, he stayed in the area despite the weather. He has been working in the localization industry for 10 years, in different roles. The last several years of which have been spent as a Localization Engineer, trying to make sense of why problems occur when software is improperly internationalized.

Daniel Yacob has been an active volunteer in the L10N and I18N arenas for 15 years, working to ensure that computer standards, and the applications that apply them, cover the languages and cultures of Ethiopia and Eritrea.  In his professional life he has worked for the last 2 years with the leading semantic technology consulting firm, TopQuadrant, engaged in what has become the largest ontology development project ever undertaken for NASA’s 30-year “Constellation” program.  Daniel is now keen on bringing this experience back to the M17N field to help ensure that the data and information resources developed by the Unicode Consortium can reside as linked data on the emerging “Giant Global Graph” (GGG).

Owen Yen has been an International Program Manager at Microsoft for three years, working on the Windows Live Messenger product. Owen has over 18 years of industry experience, working for companies such as Microsoft, IBM, JP Morgan Chase and R. R. Donnelley. Owen has an MBA degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, as well as a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Roy Yokoyama is a Principal Globalization Engineer at Motorola. He has more than 15 years of experience in the field of Windows programming and internationalization. Roy is currently working on globalizing the next version of Motorola Enterprise mobile client products. Before joining Motorola, Roy was a Senior Browser Development Engineer at Netscape/AOL Time Warner in Mountain View, CA. Previous to that position, he was the Project Leader of the Globalization team at COREL Corporation, Ottawa, CANADA. Roy received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1989 from Carleton University, Ottawa, CANADA.

Steve Zilles has been involved with the W3C since 1994 and has been a participant in both the CSS and XSL Working Groups. He has worked for Adobe Systems, Inc since 1992 in areas related to text formatting and rendering. He was active in the design of the ISO print description language and in the use of Postscript and PDF as standards for publishing.