Encode/Include: How Can Digitally Disadvantaged Languages Thrive?

Where Research Begins

HOW DO DIGITALLY DISADVANTAGED LANGUAGES THRIVE?

Green Library (Silicon Valley Archives)

HOW DO DIGITALLY DISADVANTAGED LANGUAGES THRIVE?For languages written in unique scripts, being added to the Unicode standard is only the beginning. <a href="https://silicon.stanford.edu/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">SILICON</a>* aims to accelerate the next steps: font and keyboard design, OCR algorithms, AI development.* Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New MediaWith generous support of the Stanford Office of the President • Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences • Stanford Libraries • Stanford Humanities Center • History • Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages • English • Computer Science • Silicon Valley Archives • CESTA CIDR • DHAsia • Global Studies • Center for East Asian Studies • Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center • East Asian Languages and Cultures • History and Philosophy of Science • Taube Center for Jewish Studies • Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

Learn more about <a href="https://silicon.stanford.edu/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">SILICON</a>: the Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media

P﻿ANELISTS (subject to change)

Madihah AkhterMadihah Akhter (she/her) is currently a researcher and product inclusion specialist at PayPal. On any given day, you can find her advocating for customer centricity throughout the product development lifecycle, ensuring research participant pools contain people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, measuring inclusion efforts for organizational impact, and operationalizing inclusive artifacts and processes. Madihah is part of several cross-industry working groups focused on product inclusion in tech. She has an extensive background in inclusion &amp; diversity consulting and higher education, including a PhD in history and gender studies from Stanford University as well as leadership experience directing belonging intervention programs that support students from underrepresented backgrounds. When she's not advocating for people, inclusion, and justice, Madihah can be found hiking in the Santa Cruz mountains, trying new recipes, and reading fiction.

Deborah AndersonDeborah (Debbie) Anderson is Project Lead of the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley, a project that assists communities getting their script and characters into Unicode. She is also Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc, which reviews all non-emoji and non-CJK ideograph Unicode proposals. In addition, she is International Representative for the US National Body to the ISO subcommittee on Coded Character Sets. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies (linguistics emphasis).

Francesca Di MarcoFrancesca Di Marco is the Head of Internationalization and Design Operations at Pinterest where she leads the internationalization and global development program for product and marketing. She is passionate about building internationalization orgs from scratch, enabling scalable globalization and localization strategies, and bridging gaps across functions and regional offices. Francesca is a lifelong language nerd and a former lecturer on the History of Modern Japan. In her spare time, she makes documentaries.

Andrew GlassAndrew Glass is a product manager in the Experiences and Devices Group at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 2008 he has specialized in font rendering, keyboards, text intelligence and other input-related user experiences. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington, Department of Asian Languages and Literature. He is the author of “Four Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras”, a book published by the University of Washington Press. He is coeditor of the Gandhari Dictionary (gandhari.org). He has contributed many proposals to Unicode to define and improve support for different complex scripts. These include Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts, Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls, as well as refinements to ADLaM, Chakma, Mongolian and others. Prior to joining Microsoft, he taught at the University of Washington, University of Leiden, and Bukkyō University in Japan.

Manish GoregaokarManish Goregaokar is fascinated by the richness of human writing systems, and is very excited for the field of grammatology to get more opportunities to grow. He is heavily involved in the Unicode Script Ad Hoc and the Unicode Properties &amp; Algorithms Group, which manage important milestones for the encoding process for new scripts at Unicode. He is also involved in the Rust open source project, focusing on developer tooling. He works as a software engineer on Google’s internationalization team, where he is helping build a next-generation, modular internationalization library called ICU4X.

Anushah HossainAnushah Hossain is a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University and a research associate at the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley. She researches the origins of the multilingual internet, with a focus on South Asian languages and politics. She has a PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley.

Thomas PhinneyThomas Phinney is a type designer and font forensics specialist, who has created multi-writing-system fonts for Adobe and Google. He is also president of <a href="https://atypi.org/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">ATypI</a> (Association Typographique Internationale), the global fonts and typography association, serving on its board from 2004–2020, and 2023–present. Phinney is involved in the business of type, having been product manager for fonts at Adobe and Extensis, and CEO of FontLab. He has four patents, an MS in printing/typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Phinney designed Adobe Original typeface Hypatia Sans, and his team’s open-source typeface Science Gothic (with Vassil Kateliev and Brandon Buerkle) is a 4-axis variable font commissioned by Google Fonts. He was commissioned to lead variable font development of Google’s Material Design icon set, “Material Symbols.” He is also currently commissioning African designers to design new typefaces that include extended-Latin support for African languages, for Google Fonts.

Nina Shen RastogiNina Shen Rastogi is a staff content designer at Google and a technologist who focuses on language and communication. As a user experience leader at Google and Meta, she has designed global products spanning privacy, trust and safety, and social impact, including connecting 2 billion people to health resources via Meta’s COVID-19 products and campaigns. She’s also built award-winning social writing communities, led engagement marketing programs for voice assistants, and created films about misinformation. As a journalist, she’s been a regular contributor to Slate and Vulture. Nina has done graduate work in cultural criticism and Shakespearean studies and is a proud recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Alolita SharmaAlolita Sharma is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Governing Board Member from Apple, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee member and CNCF Observability Technical Group (TAG) co-chair. Alolita leads Apple’s AIML observability teams. She contributes to open source, open standards at OpenTelemetry, Observability Query Language standard, Unicode, W3C. She has served on the boards of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), SFLC.in and Unicode Consortium. Previously Alolita led open source observability and search engineering at AWS and has managed engineering teams at IBM, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia. Her talks and publications can be found at alolitasharma.com.

Ben YangBen Yang is a linguist and software engineer specializing in writing systems, currently working for Adobe on the Adobe Text Engine. He is a Unicode representative for Adobe, and has been a regular participant in the Unicode Consortium for 8 years. Previously, he was the Director of Technology for PanLex, a project of The Long Now Foundation. He has a strong interest in making technology more widely available to speakers of underserved languages and the preservation and digitization of historic and traditional writing systems. He has presented at WikidataCon, the Unicode Conference, the International Multilingual User Group (IMUG), SF Globalization, and the East Bay Refugee Forum.

Shumin ZhaiShumin Zhai is a Principal Scientist and Engineering Director at Google, where he oversees research, design, and engineering of mobile input and interaction methods. He currently focuses on Gboard - the Google multimodal keyboard (by tap, gesture, and voice, for both text and expressions) available to billions of users in hundreds of languages on Android phones, tablets and smartwatches around the world. His past research career has contributed to both theoretical modeling of human-computer interaction and practical user interface innovations. He originated and led the SHARK project at IBM Research and co-founded, with his then PhD student Per Ola Kristensson, a start-up company ShapeWriter Inc that pioneered computational intelligence and human-factors-research-based swipe-gesture typing keyboards on mobile phones. Shumin Zhai’s publications have received 20000+ citations and 80+ H-index, the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award, the ACM MobileHCI Impact Award, and an IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award. He is the named inventor on 200 US patents. Zhai served as the 4th Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. He also serves on journal editorial boards, conference paper programs, and Ph.D. thesis committees. Zhai earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Toronto in 1995. In 2006, he was selected as one of the ACM’s inaugural class of Distinguished Scientists. In 2010 he was named a Member of the ACM CHI Academy and became a Fellow of the ACM. In 2020 he was inducted to the University of Toronto’s Engineering Alumni Hall of Distinction.

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Encode/Include: How Can Digitally Disadvantaged Languages Thrive?

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