Joe Becker (Unicode)

Joseph D. Becker is an American computer scientist and one of the co-founders of the <a href="/facts/Unicode/DDu3MfPV">Unicode</a> project, and a Technical Vice President Emeritus of the <a href="/facts/Unicode_Consortium/mJQClyDW">Unicode Consortium</a>. He has worked on artificial intelligence at <a href="/facts/BBN_Technologies/9kA7axL3">BBN</a> and multilingual workstation software at <a href="/facts/Xerox/qyxVVqaa">Xerox</a>.
Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular. His 1984 paper in <a href="/facts/Scientific_American/jkl8bhUN">Scientific American</a>, "Multilingual Word Processing", was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish <a href="/facts/Character_(computing)/X2zKLFFB">characters</a> and <a href="/facts/Glyph/A7Gesbxj">glyphs</a>. Following the release of the paper in 1987, he and two others began investigations into the practicality of creating a universal character set. Becker teamed up with his colleague <a href="/facts/Lee_Collins_(Unicode)/xSWKX7Ar">Lee Collins</a> who worked alongside him at <a href="/facts/Xerox/qyxVVqaa">Xerox</a> and <a href="/facts/Mark_Davis_(Unicode)/9xdIRMGW">Mark Davis</a> of <a href="/facts/Apple_Inc./oTJYta3k">Apple</a>. It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project. His article <a href="/facts/Unicode_88/DDu3MfPV">Unicode 88</a>, contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.

Joe Becker (Unicode) open-in-new

Joe Becker (Unicode)