Mike Ksar recently accepted early retirement from Hewlett-Packard Company after more than 24 years of service with them. Mike has been working in the IT industry for nearly 40 years. He spent about 18 years in the area of internationalization programs and processes in R&D at HP product divisions and in the field, five years of which at HP in Geneva, Switzerland managing the development of localized products for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese and languages of Eastern Europe.

For the last 10 years, Mike has been the Convener of the ISO technical working group (JTC1/SC2/WG2) that developed and published ISO/IEC 10646. His term as Convener has been extended for three more years at the recent SC2 plenary meeting in Athens, Greece in September 2000. Mike is also a member of the Unicode Consortium Board of Directors; his term as a Board member has been extended for three more years in November 2000. He is very active in both the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) as well as the Unicode Editorial Committee. He was a key player towards the merging of the first version of Unicode and ISO 10646 and continues to play a significant role in supporting the continued development, convergence and synchronization of ISO 10646 and Unicode. He is a contributing author and editor to Unicode 3.0.

Mike was also the HP-wide representative at NCITS/L2, the U.S. encoding technical committee. In addition, Mike has been very active in ECMA at management and technical committees. Mike has been HP representative at the W3C Internationalization Working Group.

During his tenure at HP, Mike published several guidelines that focus on Globalization and the product generation process.

Mike has an MBA from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California and a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.