Mark E. Davis is a specialist in software text processing and internationalization and the co-founder and president of the Unicode Consortium.
Education
After getting his Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy from Stanford University, he worked in Switzerland for several years, then returned to California to join Apple, where he co-authored the Macintosh KanjiTalk and Script Manager, and authored the Macintosh Arabic and Hebrew systems
Career
He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications, being the primary author or co-author of Bi-directional Algorithm (used worldwide to display Arabic and Hebrew text), Collation (used for sorting and searching), Normalization, Scripts, Text segmentation, Identifiers, Regular Expressions, Compression, Character Conversion, and Security. Davis has specialized in internationalization and text software for many years. He also worked on parts of the Mac Operating system, including contributions to the design of TrueType.
Later, he was the manager and architect for the Taligent international frameworks, and was then the architect for a large part of the Java international libraries.
At International Business Machines Corporation, he was the Chief Software Globalization Architect. He is the author of a number of patents, primarily in internationalization.
At various times he has also managed groups or departments covering text, internationalization, operating system services, porting, and technical communications. Davis founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of Intensive Care Unit (a major Unicode software internationalization library), and designed the core of the Java internationalization classes.
He also is the vice-chair of the Unicode CLDR project, and is a co-author of BCP 47 "Tags for Identifying Languages" (Reconstruction Finance Corporation 4646 and Reconstruction Finance Corporation 5646), used for identifying languages in eXtensible Markup Language and HyperText Markup Language documents.
Since the start of 2006, Davis has been working on software internationalization at Google, focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), overall improvement and adoption of the software internationalization libraries (including Intensive Care Unit), and the introduction and maintenance of stable identifiers for languages, scripts, regions, timezones, and currencies.