Mark Davis (Unicode)

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Dr. Mark Davis (born September 13, 1952) is the co-founder of the Unicode project and the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991.^[1]

He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications, being the primary author or co-author of the Bi-directional 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.

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. ^[2]