Joseph D. Becker is one of the co-founders of the Unicode project, and an Officer Emeritus of the Unicode Consortium. He has worked on artificial intelligence at BBN and multilingual workstation software at Xerox. He speaks survival-level Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Russian as well as English.^[1]

Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular. His 1984 paper in Scientific American, "Multilingual Word Processing", was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish characters and glyphs.^[2]

In 1987, Becker (then at Xerox), together with Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple began investigations into the practicality of creating a universal character set.^[3] It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project.^[4] His article, Unicode 88, contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.

Notes

1. ^ http://www.unicodeconference.org/review-committee.htm
2. ^ http://www.sil.org/computing/routledge/simons/multilingual.html
3. ^ Summary Narrative of the History of Unicode
4. ^ http://unicode.org/history/earlyyears.html