Project
W3C succeeds only if it actually gets the work done that it is committed to deliver. The W3C Project function focuses on meeting all of the milestones of all of the groups, facilitating the work of Team Contacts, Chairs, and Editors to ensure that the work is moving forward appropriately, and driving the work necessary to achieve operational success.
Denis Ah-Kang
Denis joined W3C in August 2011, as part of the Systems Team, to become the W3C Webmaster at the MIT host site in Cambridge, MA, USA.
Between 2013 and 2014, he joined the Interaction Domain to work on the HTML5 test suite. He is now working on maintaining the W3C infrastructure and is involved in the development of the publications tools.
Prior to joining W3C, Denis worked for various consulting companies as a software developer.
Denis is currently based in Reunion Island.
denis@w3.org
Denis's Github account
Kazuyuki Ashimura
Role: Team Contact for WoT and ME; Project Specialist; Smart Cities Industry Champion
Project Professor, Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University
Kaz joined the W3C Team at Keio University SFC in April 2005. Prior to joining the Team, Kaz worked for twelve years on research and development on speech and natural language processing.
He is interested in Web technologies in general, esp. those related to Voice/Multimodal, Web&TV, WoT and Smart Cities. He would like to make people happy using the Web technologies.
Kaz received his B.S. in Mathematics from Kyoto University and his Doctor of Engineering degree from Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
Bert Bos
Role: Communications
Bert Bos completed his Ph.D. in Groningen, The Netherlands, on a prototyping language for graphical user interfaces. He then went on to develop a browser targeted at humanities scholars, before joining the W3C at INRIA/Sophia-Antipolis in October 1995. He is co-inventor of CSS and created & led W3C's Internationalization activity. After working on HTML and XML, he led for many years the CSS and later also the Mathematics activities. He is now working on privacy technologies and is part of the W3C communications team.
Carine Bournez
Carine joined the W3C team in 2001 as part of the Jigsaw HTTP server development team.
She holds an engineer degree and a PhD in Computer Science, with a research area in distributed artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems.
She has worked in the Web Services Activity and the XML Activity as staff contact for multiple Working Groups, in several EU-funded projects, in the Systems Team, and in internal tools development.
Currently staff for WebRTC WG, Web Performance WG, SVG WG.
Pierre-Antoine Champin
Role: Data Strategist
Pierre-Antoine joined W3C in February 2021, as a fellow from ERCIM, then from Inria. He is a member of the Strategy Team, with a focus on Data Interoperability. Before that, he has been involved in many Linked Data and Semantic Web related working groups (including RDF 1.1, Linked Data Platform and JSON-LD). He has been working with RDF and other Semantic Web technologies for as long as he can remember.
Pierre-Antoine received an engineering degree from INSA Lyon in 1997 and a PhD in Computer Science from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in 2002. He is currently based in Lyon, France.
François Daoust
François takes part in on-going discussions and developments around the convergence between Web and media, serving both as Entertainment Champion in the Industry team and as Media Specialist in the Strategy team. François is also staff contact for the media-related Media Working Group, Second Screen Working Group and GPU for the Web Working Group.
François initially joined W3C in November 2007 from Microsoft where he integrated an on-portal mobile search engine called MotionBridge. From 2007 to 2011, he served as staff contact for the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, the Web and TV Interest Group, the Web Real-Time Communications Working Group and was co-Activity Lead for the Web and TV Activity. He left W3C at the end of 2011 to develop cross-platform Web applications in a French start-up called Joshfire. François came back to W3C on May 2014.
Emma Fraser
Role: Board enablement specialist
Emma joined W3C in July 2024, fresh out Wellesley College '24, to assist as recording secretary for the Advisory Board and Board of Directors.
She graduated Magna Cum Laude with degrees in Psychology and East Asian Languages and Cultures with a focus in Chinese. She also published research in Psychology investigating the correlation between the sexualization of female characters in video games and hostile sexism, comparing genres with sexist/feminist attitudes.
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
Role: W3C Community Management Lead, W3C Staff Contact & VR/AR Strategy Specialist
Dominique is W3C Developer Relations Lead, W3C Community Development Lead (in charge of managing the Community Groups program), part of the W3C Project Management team, W3C Strategy Specialist on Virtual and Augmented Reality, and serves as staff contact in the Web Real-Time Communications Working Group, the Web and Machine Learning Web Working Group, and the Web & Networks Interest Group. He is the General Manager of ERCIM, the W3C Partner in Europe. He also develops tools and applications as needed in his various roles.
He joined initially W3C’s Communication and Systems Team as a member of the Webmaster Team in October 2000; after having joined then led the QA Activity until September 2005, Dom took part in the Mobile Web Initiative as Staff Contact for the Best Practices Working Group and later as co-Chair of the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group. Dom also served as Staff Contact for the Device and sensors Working Group
Dominique holds an engineering degree from the “Grande Ecole” École Centrale Paris.
Shawn Lawton Henry
Role: Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Program Lead
Shawn joined W3C in February 2003 to lead worldwide education and outreach activities promoting digital accessibility for people with disabilities through the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). As WAI Program Lead she directs collaboration on WAI vision, strategic plan, implementation priorities, and stakeholder engagement in W3C accessibility activities.
Shawn focuses her personal passion for accessibility on bringing together the needs of individuals and the goals of organizations in designing human-computer interfaces.
She holds a BSc in English with focus on computer science and technical writing, and an MSc in Digital Inclusion.
Shawn often uses 'shawna' for public accounts to help communicate that she is a 'cisgender' female. 'Shawn' is given/first name, 'Lawton' is middle name (and previous family name), 'Henry' is family/last name; it's not hyphenated.
Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman graduated at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, he joined the Centre for Mathematics & Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he had a tenure position between 1988 and the year of his retirement, i.e., in 2021. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1989 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands.
He joined the W3C Permanent Staff in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI, and has remained as an emeritus W3C team member since his retirement from CWI. As a W3C staff member, he served as Head of Offices until June 2006, then as Semantic Web Activity Lead until December 2013. He is currently the Publishing@W3C Technical Lead, as well as the W3C staff representative for the work on Publishing Maintenance and on Verifiable Credentials. He was also member of the Strategy, as well as the Technical & Architecture teams of W3C until 2021.
Before joining W3C he worked in different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but he spent most of his research years in computer graphics and information visualization. He also participated in various graphics-related ISO standardization activities and software developments. See his professional web site for further details, including his list of publications, presentations, and various social activities.
Richard Ishida
Role: Internationalisation Specialist
Richard joined the W3C team in July 2002 to work on Web internationalization (i18n), serving as staff contact and technical contributor to the Internationalization Working Group. He was the Internationalization Lead, between 2004 and 2023. He was also a Strategy Specialist for internationalization, and created and led the highly successful MultilingualWeb EC project. After introducing education and outreach activities to the W3C Internationalization work, he went on to develop a framework for investigating and resolving gaps related to the support of languages and writing systems around the world. Semi-retired as of the beginning of 2024, he now focuses on that 'Language Enablement' work.
He serves on the Unicode Editorial Committee and the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group. For many years he also served on the Unicode Conference board, and has a Unicode Bulldog Award. He developed the W3C Internationalization Checker, and in his spare time creates tools and articles (such as UniView) to help people working with characters and scripts from around the world.
Richard has a background in translation and interpreting, computational linguistics, software engineering, and translation tools. Prior to joining the W3C, he was a Global Design Consultant at Xerox, providing services and training to external clients as well as to internal development teams with regard to the international design and localizability of user interfaces and documents. He received a corporate award for work on the Xerox product development process.
Ian Jacobs
Role: Payments Lead
As of 1 Feb 2015, Ian leads W3C's Web Payments Activity.
From September 2004 through January 2015, Ian was the Head of W3C Marketing and Communications. He managed the Consortium's Comm activities, including press, publications, branding, marketing, and aspects of Member relations.
Ian began at W3C in 1997 and for 7 years co-edited a number of specifications, including HTML 4.0, CSS2, DOM Level 1, three WAI Guidelines (Web Content, User Agent, Authoring Tool), the TAG's Architecture of the World Wide Web, and the W3C Process Document.
Ian received a degree in Engineering from Yale then a master's degree in software engineering from the CERICS in France. Ian then worked as a software engineer for five years, including at the INRIA.
Yves Lafon
Yves Lafon studied Mathematics and computer science at ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, France, and at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Montreal, Canada. His field of study was signal recognition and processing. He discovered Internet Relay Chat and the Web in Montreal in 1993 and has been making robots and games for both. He joined the W3C in October 1995 to work on W3C's experimental browser, Arena. Then he worked on Jigsaw, W3C's Java-based server, on HTTP/1.1 and started the work on SOAP 1.2.
Yves is now the TAG Team Contact and Web Transport Team Contact.
Philippe Le Hegaret
Role: Strategy and Project Lead
Philippe Le Hegaret is the Strategy and Project Lead for W3C, responsible for the technical mission of the Consortium. As Project Lead, he is responsible to meet all of the milestones of all of the groups, facilitate the work of Team Contacts, Chairs, and Editors, and drive the work necessary to achieve operational success. He is the current co-Chair of the W3C Process Community Group. Until 2016, he was for the former W3C Interaction Domain, which produced frontend Web technologies including HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WOFF, or Web APIs. Prior to 2009, Philippe lead the W3C Architecture Domain, which produced the W3C Core technologies in the area of XML, Web Services, and Internationalization. He is a former Chair of the Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group.
Prior to joining W3C, Philippe promoted the use of XML inside Bull in 1998, also focusing on the interaction between XML and object structures. He wrote the first version of the CSS validator in 1997.
Philippe holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Nice (France).
Chris Lilley
Role: Technical Director
Chris is, since 2008, a W3C Technical Director. He is also staff contact for the Audio, CSS, WebFonts and PNG Working Groups. His interests include advanced 2D graphics - both vector and raster - color management, online and multilingual typography. He is the W3C liaison to the International Color Consortium (ICC). He was for three years a member of the TAG and for many years co-chaired the Hypertext Coordination Group. He was awarded a Technical Emmy at the 73rd Tech Emmy awards in 2022, for his work on Web Fonts.
Chris joined W3C in 1996. He holds a BSc in Biochemistry, an MSc in Biological Computation and a postgraduate diploma in Bioinformatics. Previously at the Computer Graphics Unit, University of Manchester in the UK, Chris has been working with Web technologies since 1993.
Daniel Montalvo
Role: Accessibility Specialist
Daniel Montalvo joined the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in 2019 to edit the Curricula on Web Accessibility. He is currently the Staff Contact for the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Working Group, the WCAG2ICT Task Force, and the Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Task Force. He supports accessibility across W3C, providing guidance and reviews. Daniel liaises with standards organizations, people with disabilities, and other stakeholders to support W3C standardization efforts.
Simone Onofri
Role: W3C Security Lead
Simone joined in February 2024 as Security Lead for W3C, part of the Strategy Team. Inspired by the fact that Security is an integral part of human rights and civil liberties, and included in the Ethical Web Principles, its mission is to "shape the secure web". By supporting Security Working Groups as Team Contact, coordinating Security Reviews of the standards and promoting Web Security education for all.
Ruoxi Ran
Role: Web Accessibility Engineer
Roy (冉若曦) joined World Wide Web Consortium in August 2017, working as a Web Accessibility Specialist in W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Roy is currently based in Beijing, W3C China host of Beihang University. He works with the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group, Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and Education and Outreach Working Group. Also, he is responsible for the promotion, coordination, and harmonization of web accessibility standards in China.
Roy received his Master's Degree in Software Engineering and did some research work on accessibility during his postgraduate life, meanwhile, he is working on a PhD at Zhejiang University.
Atsushi Shimono
Role: W3C Team
Atsushi joined the W3C team in November 2018. Currently in the Projects team, and staff for internationalization, Immersive-Web WG, and Timed-Text WG.
Atsushi holds a PhD in Science, with a research area in Astrophysics (observations of Active Galactic Nucleus) from Kyoto University in Japan.
Tzviya Siegman
Role: Sustainability Lead
Tzviya joined W3C in September 2024 as Sustainability Lead and is responsible for North American Member Relations. Prior to joining the Team, Tzviya worked as Standards Principal at Wiley. She became a group participant in 2013 in many of the Publishing groups at W3C, where she led, coordinated, and contributed to several initiatives to develop common standards and best practices.
Tzviya also joined the Positive Work Environment group, which she now chairs, and helped rewrite W3C’s Code of Conduct. Tzviya was elected to the W3C Advisory Board for 3 consecutive terms between 2018 and 2024. She was elected Chair of that group during all of her terms. Tzviya enjoys working on sustainability because it is an essential area for W3C to explore, ensuring that our impact on the physical world is positive and prioritizes the planet and people.
Tzviya received a BA in English Literature from Yeshiva University, speaks Hebrew, and is interested in her kids and pottery and reading in her spare time.
Michael[tm] Smith (sideshowbarker)
Role: W3C Japan team
W3C staff support for the WebAssembly Working Group and WebApps Working Group and the WICG. Maintainer of the W3C HTML Checker (validator). W3C rep for the Web Platform Tests project. W3C liaison to Ecma. Closely involved in WHATWG work (including many contributions to the HTML spec) since 2006. One of the core reviewers/maintainers for MDN Web Docs (4500+ reviews). Patch/code contributor to browser-engine projects: chiefly Ladybird (including ARIA and HTML-AAM support) but also Safari/WebKit (committer; contributions include the details@name exclusive-accordian implementation), Firefox/Gecko (mostly HTML parser contributions), and Chromium/Blink (minor patches, including V8 patch). Worked at Opera for a time back in the day. Elected moderator at Stack Overflow. Living and working in Tokyo.
Tara Whalen
Role: Privacy Lead
Tara joined the W3C Team in September 2024 as Privacy Lead to play a key part in the development of technologies that enhance the privacy of the Web and engage with industry and academic leaders on privacy issues and trends, to identify and cultivate new proposals for standardization that improve privacy through stakeholder outreach, and consensus-building.
As part of this role, Tara maintains a community of privacy reviewers to help with privacy reviews of W3C standards. Tara is also the W3C Team Contact of the Privacy Working Group and the Private Advertising Technology Working Group.
Kevin White
Role: Accessibility Technical Lead
Kevin is Accessibility Technical Lead for the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In this role Kevin contributes to internationally recognized standards that support accessibility. He leads the WAI-CooP, co-funded by the European Commission. Kevin provides support and oversight of the accessibility Working Groups, collaborates on WAI strategic planning, and manages W3C accessibility support.
Xiaoqian Wu
Role: W3C China Site Manager
Ms. Wu Xiaoqian (吴小倩) joined W3C in October 2013. Since then, she has been serving as a team contact for a few W3C groups, including the Web Applications WG, the Web Editing WG, the MiniApps WG and the Chinese Web IG.
In September 2018, she became the W3C China Site Manager, responsible for our daily operation in China.
Xiaoqian holds a BA in Software Engineering and an MSc in Animation Design.
Fuqiao Xue
Role: Internationalization (I18n) Lead; I18n WG Staff contact
Since January 2024, Fuqiao Xue is Internationalization Lead, and the contact point for all internationalization related activity at W3C.
Fuqiao joined W3C in July 2017, where he is Strategy Specialist for internationalization. He is staff contact for and contributes technically to the W3C Internationalization Working Group.
Fuqiao has a background in software engineering. He has been involved in free software since 2010, including GNU, Mozilla, and many other free software projects.
