Update on the Internationalization & Unicode Conference

This is an update on the annual Internationalization & Unicode Conference. As some of you know, Object Management Group (OMG), our events and logistics partner for the annual Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC), is moving in a different strategic direction.

We decided to mutually end the partnership and are now in the process of transferring the various resources from OMG to the Unicode Consortium.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the OMG team, especially Mike Narducci and Carol David, for their support and dedication in making IUC such a mainstay for the global internationalization community.

Unicode would also like to thank the dedicated group of volunteers who worked with Rick McGowan on the program committee. Some of them have been on the committee from the early days even before we began working with OMG in 2006. This speaks to the strong commitment by the individuals as well as the organizations supporting their involvement over the years.

THE WAY FORWARD

While the ending of this partnership creates some challenges, it is also an opportunity to reshape how Unicode approaches community building and training. And given how the meeting and event landscape continues to evolve, it is a great time to explore best practices and apply lessons learned from other meetings and groups.

To that end, Unicode staff and a small group of volunteers convened late last year and will continue meeting in the coming 60-90 days to create the future IUC.

REQUEST

The Unicode Consortium is always looking to improve its conference. We recognize IUC as a key opportunity each year for knowledge-sharing, community building, and evangelization and want your help to shape the future IUC. Please give us your input and ideas by EOD on Friday, March 11th in one of these brief questionnaires.

(1) Survey for previous attendees
(2) Survey for those who have yet to attend

NEXT STEPS

Once we have additional community input and an update on our specific plan, we will share that information with the broader community via this blog and other channels, including on the meeting website at www.unicodeconference.org.

In the meantime, thanks for your time and ideas!

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Over 144,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Announcing Internationalization & Unicode Conference #45 Keynote Speaker Gretchen McCulloch

Taking Playfulness Seriously—When character sets are used in unexpected ways

HEEEEELLLLLLOOOO friends of Unicode! HaVE yoU HEard? 🚨🚨This year’s keynote speaker is Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist and bestselling author of the 2019 book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. ✍️ You ✍️ may ✍️ also ✍️ know ✍️ Gretchen ✍️ from ✍️ her ✍️ column ✍️ about ✍️ internet ✍️ language ✍️ in ✍️ WIRED. If you aren’t familiar withGretchen’s book it includes great insights of how language and technology evolves! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from her in person. (♥ω♥*)

Her talk, “Taking Playfulness Seriously—When character sets are used in unexpected ways,” explores those trailblazing language disrupters, who aren’t checking out the Oxford English dictionary or asking themselves, “What would my college English prof do about this comma?” You know who you are! 👀 She’ll discuss all the creative ways real-life netizens playfully create ASCII art out of text or combine emoji to convey new meanings, as well as the problems that arise when these kinds of creative uses clash with technical tools behind the scenes that aren’t expecting the unexpected—and what some solutions might look like.

In addition to Gretchen McCulloch, the conference offers Unicode tutorials, talks and panels on internationalization, web design, emoji, indigenous languages, historical scripts, and more. Of course, the conference also includes plenty of networking opportunities, as well as a special celebration of the Unicode Consortium’s 30th anniversary!

See What’s Happening at IUC 45

For thirty years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Join us in Santa Clara to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

Join expert practitioners and industry leaders as they present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency of supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

Join us for the Internationalization & Unicode Conference 45, October 13-15, 2021, Santa Clara, California. To register and learn more, please visit the Internationalization & Unicode Conference website. Object Management Group®, (OMG®) organizes the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences around the world under an exclusive license granted by the Unicode Consortium.

Program Announced for IUC 45!

For over 30 years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. As we navigate the new normal, we invite you to join us in Santa Clara, CA to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

Trained, Tested, Trusted: Understand best practices in process and among teams reliably delivering high quality global products. Examine how developers build, test, and deploy great global products. Explore technologies for design, localization, multilingual testing, workflow management, and content management.

Expert practitioners and industry leaders present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency in supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

Track and Session Topics to Include:

Architecture	Case Studies
Fonts/Emojis	ICU/CLDR
Internationalization	Language Sustainability
Localization	Scripts

Register Today!

About The Unicode Consortium

The Unicode® Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of India, Microsoft, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Salesforce, SAP, Tamil Virtual Academy, The University of California (Berkeley), Yat Labs, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members. For a complete member list go to https://home.unicode.org/membership/members/ For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium.

About the Event Producer

OMG® is the Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode Conferences. OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG's modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG's middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries. OMG has offices at 109 Highland Avenue, Needham, MA 02494 USA. This email may be considered to be commercial email, an advertisement or a solicitation.

For more information about OMG, visit us online at https://go.omgprograms.org/e/658223/2021-05-19/4hvqrv/283005991?h=Oj2eGlxYpYR7gx1lmU8Rxbrb1HmYWLHAiDyImxZoBI4.

Call for Participation Announced for IUC 44

The IUC 44 Program Committee invites you to submit your session, tutorial, or panel abstracts for the 44th Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 44) in Santa Clara, California, October 14-16, 2020.

Join other industry leaders as they map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas, and showcase the latest technologies and best practices for creating, managing, and testing global, web, and multilingual software solutions. Be a leader. Direct the future of multilingual text and software internationalization!

Submission types could include case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards, to name a few. In addition, understanding the design of a development platform is often critical to implementing best practices in applications. The Internationalization and Unicode Conference seeks to offer technical tutorials on the internationalization capabilities and architecture of development platforms, including Mobile, Desktop, Cloud, and Virtual Operating Systems, Social Network Platforms, and Machine Translation and Machine Learning Systems.

Please submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials by Friday, March 6, 2020.

The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, April 3, 2020. Speaker agreements and materials such as photos, bios and final presentation abstracts will be required from selected presenters by Friday, April 17, 2020.

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

Please visit our website to view examples of content from past conferences.

About The Unicode Consortium

The Unicode®Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards.

The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of India, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Oracle, SAP, Tamil Virtual University, The University of California (Berkeley), plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.

For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium.

About the Event Producer

OMG® is the Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode Conferences. OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG's modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG's middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries. OMG has offices at 109 Highland Avenue, Needham, MA 02494 USA. This email may be considered to be commercial email, an advertisement or a solicitation.

For more information about OMG, visit us online at https://www.omg.org.

IUC 43 Program Announced

Join Us At IUC 43!

Trained, Tested, Trusted: Understand best practices in process and among teams reliably delivering high quality global products. Examine how developers build, test, and deploy great global products. Explore technologies for design, localization, multilingual testing, workflow management, and content management.

Expert practitioners and industry leaders present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency of supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

For over 28 years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Join us in Santa Clara to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

Track and Session Topics to Include:

• Automation
• Emojis
• Internationalization
• Programming
• Case Studies
• ICU/CLDR
• Localization
• Scripts

GOLD SPONSOR:

MEDIA SPONSOR:

IUC 42 Call for Participation Announced!

The IUC 42 Program Committee invites you to submit your session, tutorial, or panel abstracts for the 42nd Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 42) in Santa Clara, California, September 10-12, 2018.

Join other industry leaders as they map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas, and showcase the latest technologies and best practices for creating, managing, and testing global, web, and multilingual software solutions. Let imagination be your only limit!

Please submit a brief abstract by the deadline of Friday, March 9, 2018.

The Program Committee will notify authors by April 13, 2018. Speaker agreements and materials such as photos, bios and final presentation abstracts will be required from selected presenters by Friday, April 27, 2018

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

Please visit the conference website to view examples of content from past conferences.

Keynote Speaker Announced for IUC 41

Can We Escape Alphabetic Order? Chinese I.T. Before and After Unicode

Thomas S. Mullaney
Associate Professor of Chinese History, Stanford University

Drawing upon more than a decade of research in the fields of Chinese and Non-Western information technology, Stanford historian Tom Mullaney maps out the parallel and still-uncharted worlds of Chinese IT. Worlds where text encoding systems have never been hidden from the average user’s view, but instead where they are directly manipulated, command-line-style, by hundreds of millions of code-conscious users. Worlds where the mythology of “plaintext” was never allowed to take hold, and where everyone knows that ‘WYS’ is not ‘WYG’. With vivid examples pulled from the archives of telegraphy, computing, machine translation, digital typography, and more, he will give a guided tour of China‘s 200-year-old quest for a stable information order, posing a fundamental question along the way: Why has the Chinese script proven so difficult to encode, and what does this tell us about the fundamental inequalities that are still baked into our modern-day information order?

About IUC 41, October 16-18, 2017: For twenty-six years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Please join us for our 41st conference! This year's event is being held on October 16-18, 2017 in Santa Clara, California. Read more.

Be a Part of IUC 41! Call for Participation

The Internationalization and Unicode Conference® (IUC) is the annual conference of the Unicode Consortium where experts and industry leaders gather to map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas and present the latest in technologies and best practices for creation, management, and testing of global, web, and multilingual software solutions.

Join in with other industry leaders to present your ideas and solutions at the 41st Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC 41) in Santa Clara, California, October 16-18, 2017.

Please submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials by Friday, March 24, 2017. Topics can include case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards.

Full details and information about how to submit an abstract can be found on the IUC 41 Call for Participation page.

IUC 38 - Call for Participation

Do you have knowledge or experience with creating global software that will benefit others? Join other experts and industry leaders and present your ideas at The Thirty-eighth Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 38), taking place in Santa Clara, Calif., USA; November 3-5, 2014. This is the premier conference on technologies and practices for the creation and management of global and multilingual software solutions.

The Unicode Consortium hosts this event annually, and the conference is recognized for its excellent technical content, industry-tested recommendations and updates on the latest standards. Topics from previous conferences can be found on the IUC 38 website.
Submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials regarding case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards.

For details please see: http://www.unicodeconference.org/e/IUC38-CfP-01-21-14.htm

Be a Part of IUC 37! Call for Participation

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Friday, March 29th

| Submit Abstract Form |

Do you have knowledge or experience with creating global software that will benefit others? Join other experts and industry leaders and present your ideas at The Thirty-seventh Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 37), taking place in Santa Clara, Calif., USA; October 21-23, 2013. This is the premier conference on technologies and practices for the creation and management of global and multilingual software solutions. The Unicode Consortium hosts this event annually, and the conference is recognized for its excellent technical content, industry-tested recommendations and updates on the latest standards. Topics from previous conferences can be found on the IUC 37 website. Submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials regarding case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to: Application Areas • Designing software platforms, operating systems, software as a service (SAAS), or programming environments • Social networks • Search engines, SEO, discovery and navigation best practices • Websites and web services • Libraries and education • Mobile applications including iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle, Windows Mobile, tablets, etc. • Game, Cable Boxes, and other platforms • Publishing and broadcasting for a global audience • Security concerns and practices • Voice to text, text to voice • Machine translation General Techniques • Advances in technologies, algorithms or methodologies • Using internationalization libraries and programming environments • Handling bidirectional or other complex scripts • Locales and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) • Font development and Typography Managing Global Software Development and Geographically Distributed Teams • Project management and methodologies e.g. Agile • Best practices in localization process and technology • Best practices in world-ready development, testing, and deployment • Improving globalization capabilities within organizations • Approaches for migrating legacy applications to global markets Evolving Standards and Related Practices • Endangered or Unencoded Languages • Case studies and research on cross-culture communication • Internationalized Domain Names and other identifiers • Languages of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East • ISO language tag topics • HTML5, CSS3, and modern browser topics • Dealing with data formats: XML, JSON, HTML5, DITA, and upcoming standards • Unicode, encodings, scripts, character properties, and algorithms • Emoji support   Tutorial presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging. Session presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging. To be considered as a presenter for the conference, please submit a brief abstract by the deadline of Friday, March 29th.  The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, May 3rd. Final presentation materials will be required from selected presenters by Friday, July 20th.

IUC 37: Save The Date - Oct 21-23, 2013

The Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. This annual event focuses on software and Web globalization, bringing together internationalization experts, tools vendors, software implementers, and business and program managers from around the world.

Expert practitioners and industry leaders present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency of supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

This highly rated conference features excellent technical content, industry-tested recommendations and updates on the latest standards and technology. Subject areas include cloud computing, upgrading to HTML5, integrating with social networking software, and implementing mobile apps. This year's conference will also highlight new features in Unicode Version 6.1 and other relevant standards published this year.
Reasons to Attend Include:

• Tutorials and sessions for beginners, to train you and your staff on basic practices and implementation techniques for creating international software
• Learn recommended solutions to difficult problems or sophisticated requirements from industry leaders and experts in attendance
• Find help from tool and product vendors to get you to market quickly and cost-effectively

Dr. Vinton G. Cerf to Keynote IUC 36!

Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google has just been announced as the keynote speaker for the 36th Internationalization & Unicode Conference. Dr. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. Dr. Cerf is widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” for being a co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols. For details please see the on-line announcement: http://www.unicodeconference.org/e/IUC36-07-02-12.htm