Supervisory Board

Will Burgett
Intel

A major mantra at Intel is efficiency: Do more with less; Do it faster; Do it better; Do it in a scalable fashion. Automation is the key means of achieving localization and translation efficiencies. However, each company or institution reaches a limit on how much they can do this on their own.

The TAUS Data Association offers a collaborative community that builds synergy around localization processes and translation automation.

Sharing language data allows members to enhance or build:

• Translation memories
• Advanced leveraging
• Machine translation systems
• New or expanded markets
• Global revenue
• Standards in industry-sector languages and terminology
• New L10N methods, processes and technology through collaborative R&D

TDA has the potential to build collective value on a level playing field as other collaborative community efforts have done for their domains and industries.

Melissa Biggs
Sun Microsystems

Motivation Statement: One of the key strategies and basis of the business model at Sun Microsystems Inc. is to interact, assist in building, enable, and contribute to communities. Sun is eager to work within TDA to build out a framework for optimizing language data and possibly for incubating new language technologies. Sun is aligned with, and enthusiastic about, the TDA initiative. It is an exciting trend in increasing productivity and expanding in-language content offerings through sharing/ exchanging language data.

Melissa Biggs is Sr. Business Manager for the Globalization group (internationalization and localization) at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Her background in localization extends over 15 years, with management responsibiities for localization business strategies, finance, product acquisitions, program management, corporate globalization standards and operations within Sun's Globalization organization. The Globalization team at Sun is responsible for internationalization enabling, localization engineering and testing, translation and program management, and localization technology management. The team manages localized contents --- from engineering and testing, through translation --- for Sun's hardware and software products, web offerings, training, and support materials in up to 30 languages. Melissa drives Sun's machine translation framework and advanced translation technology initiatives. Her localization scope spans projects in both engineering and marketing. Melissa has also held management positions at both startups and larger corporations, including Xerox , Gould Imaging and Graphics, and Envos. Melissa is a graduate of Bucknell University.

Chris Wendt
Microsoft

Motivation statement: The principal objective for my work in the TDA supervisory board is to get the language data service operational within the shortest time possible, and in a form that entices data owners to contribute their language assets with confidence, making the reciprocal nature of this initiative a reality. I am bringing a deep understanding of the effects of language data in large volumes through my work in the machine translation team, as well as experience sharing data in Microsoft's ongoing TM publishing effort. It is important that a community-directed language data sharing organization comes to fruition, and I'll give my time and energy to help bringing this to life.

Chris Wendt graduated as Diplom-Informatiker from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and subsequently spent most of his career in several globalization-related positions at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, including Windows, Internet Explorer and MSN. He is the Group Program Manager for the Machine Translation (MT) team in Microsoft Research, responsible for applications of MT across Microsoft, including the Microsoft Translator web service, as well as language quality considerations for the MT engine itself.

Francis Tsang
Adobe Systems

Motivation statement: Available soon.

Jessica Roland
EMC

Motivation statement: Available soon.

Valarie Gilbert
Cisco Systems

Motivation statement: Cisco continues to have a strong focus on translation techniques and in particular machine translation (MT). Recognizing industry direction, we want to play a key role in forward looking technologies, standards and best practices. Within Cisco, my team has sole responsibility for MT and we believe leveraging TDA assests will allow us to support a wider range of organizations throughout the company. As a member of the TDA Board, I'm hoping to influence both the direction and awareness of MT technologies in the industry and across Cisco.