Mark Edward Davis (born September 13, 1952) is an American specialist in the internationalization and localization of software and the co-founder and chief technical officer of the Unicode Consortium, previously serving as its president until 2022.
[1][2] He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications, being the primary author or co-author of bidirectional text algorithms (used worldwide to display Arabic language and Hebrew language text), collation (used by sorting algorithms and search algorithms), Unicode normalization, Unicode scripts, text segmentation, identifiers, regular expressions, data compression, character encoding and security.
At various times he has also managed groups or departments covering text, internationalization, operating system services, porting and technical communications.
He also is the vice-chair of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project,[9] and is a co-author of Best Current Practice (BCP) 47 IETF language tag Request for Comments (RFC 4646 and RFC 5646), used for identifying languages in XML and HTML documents.
Since the start of 2006, Davis has been working on software internationalization at Google, focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), overall improvement and adoption of the software internationalization libraries (including ICU) and the introduction and maintenance of stable identifiers for languages, scripts, regions, time zones and currencies.