Keynotes Presentations

Going Global with a Search Engine

Tuoc Luong, Executive Vice President, Engineering & Technology, Ask Jeeves, Inc.

	Taking a web service global is best done from the beginning. However, often is the case that software service is designed and implemented for the United States first then re-designed later for other languages and markets worldwide. This is the case with the Ask Jeeves search service. This talk will touch on all issues (both technical and non-technical) dealing with such a re-design and move globally. Technical issues from language identification, segmentation to geographical latency. Non-technical issues from team dynamics, process in transition to business decisions. The talk will give the audience a good flavor of the issues involved in moving a highly scaleable search engine internationally. Read Keynote.
The Effect of Unicode on Type Design Charles Bigelow, Vice President, Bigelow & Holmes Inc.
	The widespread adoption of Unicode has affected type design in ways that were neither anticipated nor intended, but which may become even more significant in the future. The main factor is the creation of large fonts (“large“ in the sense of many characters) which incorporate characters for several orthographies, scripts, and symbols. A second factor is the structure of the Unicode Standard, organized by named blocks of orthographies, scripts, and symbols. A third factor is conflict between Unicode's definitional distinction of glyphs from characters, and the naive user's “common sense“ view that the glyphs depicted in the Unicode manual are in fact the characters.
Finally, there are legibility factors, user-interface issues, and security problems that arise when different characters are represented by glyphs, or combinations of glyphs, that appear similar or identical in some circumstances, especially on display screens at small sizes and low resolutions. This talk will be illustrated by examples of glyphs and fonts from a variety of typefaces, ranging from Herman Zapf's Euler fonts for mathematics, to Arial Unicode and Lucida Grande and other “global“ fonts, as they are sometimes termed, as well as scripts from Latin to Arabic to Kanji. The discussion will occasionally use terms and notions borrowed from linguistics - such such as analogy, phonemics, graphemics, grapholects, etc. - to explain and analyze the various factors.