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] His Erdős number is 2.
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.