'''Joseph D. Becker''' is one of the co-founders of the [[Unicode]] project, and an Officer Emeritus of the [[Unicode Consortium]]. He has worked on artificial intelligence at [[BBN Technologies|BBN]] and multilingual workstation software at [[Xerox]]. He speaks survival-level [[Mandarin Chinese]], [[French language|French]], [[German language|German]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]], and [[Russian language|Russian]] as well as English.<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.unicodeconference.org/review-committee.htm |archive-url=https://archive.is/uaAWu |archive-date=April 16, 2013 |quote=Joe Becker is one of the founders of the Unicode Standard effort, and an Officer Emeritus of the Unicode Consortium. He has worked on artificial intelligence at BBN and multilingual workstation software at Xerox. He speaks survival-level Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Russian, and has forgotten Latin. |publisher=Object Management Group |title=Program Review Committee}}</ref> His [[Erdős number]] is 2.{{cn|date=February 2018}}
Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular. His 1984 paper in ''[[Scientific American]]'', "[httphttps://www.jstor.org/stable/24969416 Multilingual Word Processing]", was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish [[Character (computing)|characters]] and [[glyph]]s.<ref>{{cite book|title=Using Computers in Linguistics: A Practical Guide|editor1=Helen Aristar Dry|editor2=John Lawler|isbn=978-0415167932|chapter=The Nature of Linguistic Data and the Requirements of a Computing Environment for Linguistic Research|chapter-url=http://www.sil.org/computing/routledge/simons/multilingual.html|author=Gary F. Simons}}</ref> In 1987, Becker (then at Xerox), together with [[Lee Collins (Unicode)|Lee Collins]] (also at Xerox) and [[Mark Davis (Unicode)|Mark Davis]] of [[Apple Inc.|Apple]] began investigations into the practicality of creating a universal character set.<ref name="Gardner2009">{{cite book|author=Scott Gardner|title=The Definitive Guide to Pylons|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TkEnCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA218|date=25 January 2009|publisher=Apress|isbn=978-1-4302-0534-0|page=218 |quote=The origins of Unicode date back to 1987 when Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html|title=Summary|work=History of Unicode}}</ref> It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://unicode.org/history/earlyyears.html|title=Early Years of Unicode|work=History of Unicode}}</ref> His article ''[[Unicode 88]]'',<ref name="Becker_1988_Unicode"/> contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.
