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Christopher Fynn is an independent Canadian consultant living in London UK specializing in internationalization (i18n), localization (l10n) and web development. Originally trained in printing and graphic arts technology, he has over eighteen years experience developing computer applications and fonts for non-Latin scripts. In the 1990's, he designed and developed several applications and fonts for Tibetan script; as well as a word processing application and fonts for ancient Egyptian

hieroglyphics. Since 1991, he has contributed extensively to the ISO 10646 and Unicode Standards, and has been the UK delegate to ISO 10646 WG2 meetings. From 2000 to 2002 he worked with the Dzongkha Development Authority in Bhutan designing and implementing a strategy to support Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, in Microsoft Windows. This work included developing three Open Type fonts for Dzongkha, formalizing Dzongkha collation rules and training Bhutanese counterparts in font development. Currently he is a consultant to the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library Project at the University of Virginia and the coordinator for localizing the KDE & Gnome desktops for Dzongkha.

Dr. Fakhar Lodhi has taught at George Washington University, Washington DC, USA. He has spent his time evenly in the academics and in the software industry. Before joining NUCES, he has been associated with LUMS, Lahore and the University of the Punjab in their academic programs. He has also been linked with and has been a member of founding teams of some of the leading software houses in Pakistan. His areas of interest include Software Engineering, Software Metrics, and Object Oriented Methods.

Roozbeh Pournader is a researcher at Sharif University of Technology, Computing Center, and the president of Sharif FarsiWeb, a Tehran –based company, Iran, specializing in standardization, localization, and internationalization issues, most specifically in the languages written in the Arabic script. He has been a contributor to the Unicode standard and the international standard ISO/IEC 10646 since 1999, and the official representative of the government of Iran to the Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC subcommittee for character sets,

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2. He is currently a member of the Persian Academy's Language and Computers Council, and the Information Technology Committee of ISIRI, the Iranian national standards body. He has been the editor of the Iranian national standard ISIRI 6219:2002, "Information Technology -- Persian Information Interchange and Display Mechanism using Unicode". In early 2003, Roozbeh Pournader and Michael Everson of Everson Typography, Ireland, created the report "Computer Locale Requirements of Afghanistan", defining the local requirements of the Afghan languages Pashto, Persian (Dari), and Uzbek, using feedback from many local and international experts. He has also been a gold medal winner at International Olympiad in Informatics in 1995, and a world finalist at ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in 2002.

Associate professor & Head Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing. He is currently an associate professor at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan, where he is also the founding head of Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing and coordinates MS programs in Software Project Management and MS Computer Science (specialization in Script, Speech and Language Processing). He has been working in the area of local language computing since 1997. He has successfully

lead and completed the Nafees Nasta'leeq font project (funded by IDRC, APDIP UNDP and APNIC) and is currently leading development of Urdu Machine Translation, Text-to-Speech system and Lexicon systems through a three year 30 person project funded by E-Government Directorate of Government of Pakistan. He is also leading Urdu Spell-Checker project and advising on Urdu Terminology Translation project for Microsoft, USA.. He is member of the national body of Pakistan for standardization of Pakistani Languages for computing and has authored the proposal which enabled complete Urdu support in Unicode. Within this committee, he is heading the Character set and Collation Sequence Standardization Sub-committee, which is currently working on standardization of Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi and Sindhi languages. He is a member of Bidi List of Unicode, which looks into the standardization issues of bidirectional languages. Dr. Sarmad Hussain has been awarded with Dr. M. N. Azam prize for Computer Science (2002) by Pakistan Academy of Sciences, Government of Pakistan, for his services to Urdu language computing. He is also a nominated member of PTCL R&D Fund committee which is responsible to promote R&D in IT and Telecommunications in Pakistan.

MS Computer Science, candidate, NUCES (2003). B.Sc. in Computer Science, Lahore College for Women (2002). She is presently working in Spell Checker for Urdu and is also enrolled in M.Sc. Computer Science, specializing in Computational Linguistics.

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