Joseph D. Becker is an American computer scientist and one of the co-founders of the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

project, and a Technical Vice President Emeritus of the

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intentio ...

. He has worked on artificial intelligence at BBN and multilingual workstation software at

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from St ...

. Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular. His 1984 paper in ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...

'', "Multilingual Word Processing", was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

and

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s. 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

and

Mark Davis Mark Davis may refer to: Entertainers *Mark Davis (talk show host), American radio talk show host *Mark Jonathan Davis (born 1965), American actor/singer and creator of Richard Cheese *Mark Davis, American bassist and founding member for the band ...

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

. It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project. His article '' Unicode 88'', contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Becker, Joe Living people Year of birth missing (living people) People involved with Unicode American computer scientists