Joe Becker (Unicode)
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.