Conference Biography

Conference Biography: Short

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, and one of the people responsible for Unicode emoji.

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), stable international identifiers, Google+ internationalization, and extending Google's language support.

See also https://google.com/+MarkDavis/about

Conference Biography: Long

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, being the primary author or co-author of the Bidirectional Algorithm (used worldwide to display Arabic and Hebrew text), Collation (used for sorting and searching), Normalization, Scripts, Text Segmentation, Identifiers, Regular Expressions, Compression, Character Conversion, and Security. He is also one of the people responsible for emoji being in Unicode.

For more on the role of Unicode, see his foreword to Unicode 5.0, the back cover, and other quotations from industry figures.

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), overall improvement and adoption of the software internationalization libraries (including ICU), and the introduction and maintenance of stable identifiers for languages, scripts, regions, timezones, and currencies.

Mark has specialized in object-oriented programming, internationalization, and text software for many years. After getting his doctorate from Stanford University, he worked in Switzerland for several years, then returned to California to join Apple, where he co-authored the Macintosh KanjiTalk and Script Manager, and authored the Macintosh Arabic and Hebrew systems. He also worked on parts of the Macintosh OS, including contributions to the design of TrueType. Later, he was the manager and architect for the Taligent international frameworks, and was then the architect for a large part of the Java international libraries. At IBM, he was the Chief Software Globalization Architect. He is the author of a number of patents, primarily in internationalization. At various times he has also managed groups or departments covering text, internationalization, operating system services, porting, and technical communications.

See also https://google.com/+MarkDavis/about

Publications

Patents

Sideline: Patent Troll

Mark Davis and Anne Gundelfinger originated the term "patent troll", which won an internal naming contest at in the Intel legal department. It was popularized externally by her then-boss, Peter Detkin (who is sometimes credited with inventing it), and has gone on to become the commonly accepted term for the practice.

More information

Unicode:

ICU:

G+