Joe Becker (Unicode)

For other uses, see Joe Becker.
Joe Becker
Born
Joseph D. Becker
NationalityAmerican
OccupationTechnical Vice President
Years active1980s-present
Known forCo-founder of Unicode Consortium

Joseph D. Becker is an American computer scientist and one of the co-founders of the Unicode project, and a Technical Vice President Emeritus of the Unicode Consortium. He has worked on artificial intelligence at BBN and multilingual workstation software at Xerox.

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",[1] was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish characters and glyphs.[2] 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 Lee Collins who worked alongside him at Xerox and Mark Davis of Apple.[3][4] It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project.[5] His article Unicode 88, contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.[6]

  1. ^ d. Becker, Joseph (1984). "Multilingual Word Processing". Scientific American. 251 (1): 96–107. Bibcode:1984SciAm.251a..96B. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0784-96. JSTOR 24969416.
  2. ^ Gary F. Simons (1998). "The Nature of Linguistic Data and the Requirements of a Computing Environment for Linguistic Research". In Helen Aristar Dry; John Lawler (eds.). Using Computers in Linguistics: A Practical Guide. ISBN 978-0415167932.
  3. ^ Scott Gardner (25 January 2009). The Definitive Guide to Pylons. Apress. p. 218. ISBN 978-1-4302-0534-0. The origins of Unicode date back to 1987 when Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.
  4. ^ "Summary". History of Unicode.
  5. ^ "Early Years of Unicode". History of Unicode.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Becker_1988_Unicode was invoked but never defined (see the help page).