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W3C Invited Experts are individuals who are invited by a chair of a Working Group to participate in that Working Group. The chair and the W3C staff must agree that the individual brings particular expertise to the group prior to inviting the individual to participate.
Please read more about principles and instruction in the about page.
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Jake Abma
Jake participates in:
Irfan Ali Global Head- Digital Accessibility at BLK
Irfan Ali is working as Global Head - Digital accessibility on the Web Technology and Engineering team at BlackRock. He is leading a firm-wide approach to digital accessibility, focusing on making BlackRock's digital products more usable and accessible by a wide range of users - a key element of BlackRock's commitment to diversity, Equity, and inclusion. When Irfan is not working, he is busy sparring kickboxing, running, biking, playing soccer, or composing music with his teenage girl.
Irfan participates in:
Christopher Allen Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect
Christopher Allen is an entrepreneur, technologist, and educator who specializes in collaboration, security, and trust. As a technical pioneer, he’s initiated cross-industry collaborations and created industry standards that influence the entire internet. Though he’s worked within numerous privacy and security sectors, Christopher’s recent emphasis has been on engines of trust such as blockchain, smart contracts, and smart signatures, with special emphasis on decentralized sovereign identity.
Christopher’s focus on internet trust began as the founder of Consensus Development. There, he worked with Netscape to develop SSL and co-authored the IETF TLS internet draft that is now at the heart of all secure commerce on the World Wide Web. More recently he facilitated a design workshop on Rebooting the Web of Trust, which generated several white papers about the next generation of internet privacy, security, and identity software. He is currently Principal Architect at Blockstream, leading blockchain standards efforts.
Christopher participates in:
Vicki-Jane Appleton
Arts & design professional, leading a team of fellow neurodivergent entrepreneurs and creatives, to design more inclusive and accessible tech solutions to the autism employment crisis in the U.K., Divergent Emergent specialises in neurodivergent product development and the design of new user research opportunities for Neurodivergent people who also have learning disabilities.
I have lived experience of digital, health and employment exclusion, physical and neurological disability and am passionate about using this experience for the betterment of systems, products and processes, for all.
Vicki-Jane participates in:
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Poornima Badhan Subramanian Mrs
A Digital Accessibility Subject Matter Expert and Program Manager with overall Information Technology experience from the past 14 years and contributing towards Digital Accessibility career for 12 years. Established my career roles as Digital Accessibility Compliance Advocate, Evangelist and Mentor for various organizations. An outstanding technical and Accessibility program coach and role modal in software design and development implementations.
As a passionate Digital Accessibility Evangelist, actively contributing towards Web Accessibility Initiative ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines’ authoring practices, technical recommendation drafting, public reviews, and publications.
Poornima participates in:
Sina Bahram President
Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an inclusive design firm whose clients include technology startups, research labs, Fortune-500 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. Sina has a strong background in computer science, holding undergraduate and graduate degrees in the field. As a recognized expert in accessibility, Sina enjoys collaborating with both colleagues in the field and individuals of diverse professions to devise innovative and user-centered solutions to difficult real-world problems. In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House Champion of Change by President Barack Obama for his work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. In 2015, the international accessibility community recognized Sina as an Emerging Leader in Digital Accessibility at the annual Knowbility Community Heroes of Accessibility Awards. In 2017, Sina served as the invited co-chair of the 2017 Museums and the Web conference.
Sina participates in:
Bruce Bailey IT Specialist
Bruce Bailey (he, him) has lead responsibility for the Access Board website and with providing technical assistance on Section 508, especially as that regulation relates to websites, software, and hardware. Bruce supports Access Board members serving on Election Assistance Commission (EAC) boards and committees. Bruce also serves as the Access Board 508 Program Manager. Bruce has worked for thirty years in the field of assistive technology, with the last ten years at the Access Board. Since 2001, Bruce has been an invited expert to the W3C WAI Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG). Prior to joining the Access Board, Bruce worked at ED and, prior to that, with the State of Maryland, Division of Rehabilitation Services. Bruce has a B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and an M.Ed. from State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA). Bruce lives in Frederick, Maryland.
Bruce participates in:
Bianca Berning
Designer specialising in typography, type design, and type technology, and currently work at Spotify as a Staff Typographer.
Bianca participates in:
Sally Britnell Dr
Sally is Computer Scientist, Nurse and Academic at Auckland a University of Technology.
She has a passion for provision of access needs.
Her research involves simulating disability, accessibility in mobile app development and education.
Sally participates in:
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Simon Cox Research Scientist
After an early career in geophysics and mineral exploration, he moved to focus mainly on data and informatics. Through this he has engaged with many other areas of environmental science, including water resources, marine data, meteorology, soil, ecology and biodiversity. Engagement with CODATA has extended the cross-disciplinary scope still further into social science and official statistics applications. He is principal- or co-author of a number of international standards for data. His current focus is on FAIR data, linked open data, and semantic web technologies, with a particular emphasis on formalization, publication and maintenance of controlled vocabularies and related reference data.
Simon participates in:
Andrew Cunningham Manager, Research and Development
Andrew participates in:
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Jan Jaap de Groot Mobile Accessibility Developer
Jan Jaap participates in:
Sylvie Duchateau
Sylvie Duchateau worked for 15 hears in the field of web accessibility at Association BrailleNet, France, where she trained people, helped write outreach documents on web accessibility, talked at confrences, translated documents.
She has been participating in EOWG Education and Ooutreach Working Group since 1999.
She has also coordinated the French Authorised Translation of WCAG 2.0.
Sylvie is still training, doing outreach and talks about Web Accessibility and has been working for the company Access42 since 2014.
Sylvie participates in:
Martin Dürst Aoyama Gakuin University
Martin is a full Professor at the Department of Integrated Information Technology of the College of Science and Engineering at Aoyama Gakuin University, chairs the W3C Internationalization Interest Group, and regularly participates in discussions in W3C and the IETF about Internationalization and Web technology in general.
Martin joined the W3C team at Keio-SFC in December 1997 to work on Internationalization, on a position as Project Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Media and Governance. From November 2002 to March 2004, he was a Visiting Scientist at MIT/CSAIL.
Prior to joining W3C, he was at the University of Zurich, Department of Computer Science, and was an active particpant within the HTML and CSS Working Groups as an invited expert on internationalization.
Martin obtained his masters degree from the University of Zurich in computer science, business administration, and Japanese studies. He has a Ph.D from the University of Tokyo in computer science with a thesis on compression and progressive transmission of images.
Martin participates in:
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Michael Elledge Usability Specialist
Michael participates in:
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David Fazio Founder, President
Mr. Fazio is the Founder, and President of Helix Opportunity, a disability-related business, and organizational, development consulting firm that was funded by the California Department of Rehabilitation. His life’s work focuses on eliminating the unintentional stigmatization of individuals by their differences. David survived a traumatic brain injury at the age of 13 when an arterioveunuous malformation in the right parietal line of his brain became an aneurysm and ruptured into a softball size hemorrhagic stroke. It left him completely paralyzed on the entire left half of his body, and completely blind in the left half of each eye. He is an expert in neuro-psychological, and cognitive, user experience design.
David participates in:
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Charles Hall Chief Accessibility Officer
Helping humans help humans through accessible technology.
Designing since 1988.
Developing since 1993.
Entrepreneur since 1996.
Agencies since 2000.
Accessibility since 2008.
W3C CGs since 2013.
Mentoring since 2014.
Speaking since 2016.
Local Government Advisor since 2020.
UX throughout.
Recently:
Senior UX Architect, MRM
Learning Ambassador, MRM
Member, Global Diversity Coalition, McCann Worldgroup
Charles participates in:
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Wilhelm Joys Andersen
Wilhelm participates in:
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Albert Kim
Highly competent and collaborative design engineer with seasoned knowledge about the psychology of human behavior and a passion for accessibility, inclusive design, and human-centered design.
Albert participates in:
Konstantinos Kotis Postdoctoral research scientist
Konstantinos Kotis (ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7838-9691) owns a B.Sc. in Computation from University of Manchester (UMIST), UK and a Ph.D. in Information Management (Knowledge Representation & Management) from the University of the Aegean, Greece. He is currently an assistant professor at the Dept. of Cultural Technology and Communication of the University of the Aegean, a member of the Intelligent Systems Lab, and a research associate of the Dept. of Digital Systems of the University of Piraeus (a member of the AI lab). He is currently leading the Semantic Web and IoT research group of i-Lab (https://i-lab.aegean.gr/groups/semantic-technologies-group/). His research interests include but not limited to Knowledge Engineering, Semantic data management, Semantic IoT, Semantic CH, KG-based AI chatbots. He has published more than 60 papers (h-index:16, >1200 citations) in peer-reviewed international journals (incl. IJDST, KAIS, ILE, IJKEDM, FGCS, IEEE IS, IJWGS, IJMSO, Applied AI) and conferences (incl. ESWC, ISWC, KSEM, IJCAI, VLDB) and served as reviewer and reviewer in several journals and conference events (incl. IEEE IS, IEEE TKDE, ACM TIoT, KAIS, JWS, J.UCS, IJDMMM, ICTAI, IJCAI). He has also participated in several national and international projects, including among them, Grid4All (FP7, 2008), iCore (FP7, 2012), Internet of Things (Finnish Tivit/Tekes, 2012), AMINESS (Greek Research & Technology General Secretary. 2014), datAcron (H2020, 2016), Time Machine (H2020, 2019)). For more, visit http://i-lab.aegean.gr/kotis
Konstantinos participates in:
Richard Kranendonk
Privacy Geek and DPO for hire. Looking for the right co-founders to develop tools for facilitating Privacy by Default and by Design in organisations, and make regulatory compliance less dull.
Richard participates in:
Raja Kushalnagar Professor and Director, Information Technology Program
I am the Director of the Information Technology program in the Department of Science, Technology and Mathematics at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. Our IT program has grown rapidly in the past few years, and we are exploring new concentrations and minors for the program, including cybersecurity and data science.
I primarily teach human-centered computing with a focus on accessible computing, and application development courses. I also teach cybersecurity related courses at both the introductory and specialized levels.
My research interests encompass the fields of accessible computing and accessibility/intellectual property law, with the goal of improving information access for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. In the accessible computing field, I investigate information access disparities between hearing and deaf. For example, I investigate how deaf individuals acquire information through speech-to-text, e.g., enhanced captions that provide visual cues to non-speech information.
In the accessibility/intellectual property law field, I advocate for updates in accessible and intellectual property law, to incorporate accessible computing advances such as automatic captioning/subtitling.
I have published several peer-reviewed publications and received grants in the fields of accessible computing, accessible law and intellectual property law.
Raja participates in:
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Vicki Menezes Miller
Vicki participates in:
Rebecca Monteleone Assistant Professor, Disability Studies
Rebecca participates in:
Lei Mu Hacker & Founder
Mu Lei known as NalaGinrut has been more than 7 years GNU hacker.
He is also an entrepreneur focusing on privacy-respect Web services.
Lei participates in:
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Joshue O'Connor Emerging Web Technology Specialist (Accessibility)
Josh was emerging web technology specialist with the Web Accessibility Initiative from April 2019 till March 2022. He is ex co-chair of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines working group as well as ex Head of Accessibility (Interim) for Government Digital Services (GDS) in the UK. He was the first in Ireland to graduate with an MSc in Assistive Technology and Universal Design.
He’s a tech sceptic, has written a couple of books on accessible web development - one of them isn’t bad - likes to cook Indian vegetarian food, play the blues, learn traditional Irish tunes in tricky tunings and rocks out on ‘Josh's Soundcloud’.
Joshue participates in:
Lukasz Olejnik
Lukasz Olejnik comes from an information security background. His previous engagements include security engineering work at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and CERN.
Lukasz holds a PhD from INRIA (Grenoble) in privacy. His research interests include information and computer security and privacy, especially as applied to online interactions with a special emphasis on the Web, user data disclosure and dissemination problems and privacy-sensitive matters related to Web browser functionalities, as well as Web security. In his research, he analysed user tracking and profiling on the Web. Examples include studies of Web history leaks, as well as privacy and transparency analysis of Real-Time Bidding.
Lukasz published his works in venues such as NDSS, ESORICS, WEIS and Phys Rev. He has publications spanning fields such as quantum cryptography and privacy. He co-created the What The Internet Knows About You, a demonstrator of privacy risks related with Web browsing history disclosure via Web browsers. This project included a crucial educational component. Lukasz is also responsible for How Much Are You Worth project, which provided a transparency-aiding browser extensions and was capable of submitting data from users. The data was then leveraged to quantify the value of user data in Real-Time Bidding.
Lukasz believes that private matters should stay private, but privacy risks should become public.
He can be found on Twitter @lukOlejnik
Lukasz participates in:
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Jason Pamental Designer, Strategist, Tinkerer, Typographer
Jason spends much of his time working with clients to establish their typographic systems and digital strategy, helping design and development teams works smarter and faster, and running workshops about all of the above. He is a seasoned design and user experience strategy leader with over 20 years’ experience on the web in both creative and technical roles. Clients range from type industry giants, Ivy League and High Tech, to the NFL and America’s Cup. He also researches and writes on typography for the web: he’s author of Responsive Typography from O’Reilly, articles for .Net Magazine, PRINT Magazine, HOW, Monotype.com, and frequent podcast guest. Author of online courses for Aquent’s Gymnasium platform and Frontend Masters. He’s an experienced speaker and workshop leader, having presented at over 50 national and international conferences.
The real story: mainly he just follows Tristan and Tillie around Turner Reservoir, posting photos on Instagram.
Jason participates in:
Kimberly Patch Interface Expert, Writer, Editor, Developer, and Musician
Kim is Mobile Accessibility Task Force Co-facilitator for the AG WG. She uses speech input and developed the Utter Command add-on that speeds Dragon speech input for command-and-control. As lead researcher for Duke University’s Rutherfurd Living History program, Kim architected a system for interactive transcripts. As a consultant, she helped PBS Frontline build a similar system. Kim got her start as a metro reporter in Washington D.C. for UPI and later founded the Internet beat as a Senior Editor at PC Week. Her freelance credits include the AP, Reuters, the Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, and Technology Review. She writes the PatchonTech.com blog.
Kimberly participates in:
Addison Phillips Globalization Architect
Addison participates in:
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Christine Runnegar Senior Director, Internet Trust, Internet Society
Christine participates in:
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John Simmons W3C Evangelist - Media & Entertainment, Global
John Simmons is an industry recognized expert on Web media standards. He drove Microsoft’s efforts to define DRM-interoperable encoding, adaptive bitrate streaming, the collaboration with Google, Comcast, Netflix and the W3C for HTML5 Media Extensions and a multi-year Apple collaboration to develop the Common Media Application Format.
John’s standards evangelism across the media and entertainment industry led to the creation of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Web Application Video Ecosystem (WAVE) project, a 60-company collaboration to adopt ISO/IEC and W3C standards for streaming media on a global scale.
John received the CTA 2017 Technology Leadership Award for the creation of the WAVE Project and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) 2019 Emmy Award for the Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Netflix and W3C “Standardization of HTML5, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and Media Source Extensions (MSE) for a Full TV Experience”.
Recently retired from Microsoft, John now runs a media standards consulting business from his home in the Cascade Range foothills, east of Seattle, Washington.
John participates in:
Neil Soiffer Senior Scientist
Dr. Soiffer received his PhD in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. He was a member of Tektronix's Computer Research Lab, where he created experimental math computation systems, math editors, and tools for embedded systems. Dr. Soiffer moved to Wolfram Research, where he was responsible for a number of user elements that are part of Mathematica, including the WYSIWYG math editor and programmability of Mathematica's notebook interface. He joined Design Science in 2003 and worked on math accessibility in their MathPlayer library which renders MathML both visually, aurally, and in braille. It works with browsers, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, Adobe Reader, and other applications.
Dr. Soiffer was a principal architect of MathML, and continues to have an active role in math-related standards. Currently, he is chairing the MathML refresh community group. He chaired the MathML in DAISY committee, was a NIMAS board member, and also a member of the EPUB 3 working group. He continues to be a member of the PDF/UA . He was awarded an NSF SBIR grant to make electronic documents that contain math accessible and along with ETS, was awarded a IES grant to make school materials containing math accessible.
Neil participates in:
Andrew Somers Color Science Researcher
Andrew Somers has over 35 years of professional media experience in the Hollywood film & television industry, with major credits and recognition as a matter of public record on iMDBpro. He's been working with design, color, imaging, typography, lighting, cinematography, visual effects, and the related research, engineering, & development processes since before personal computers were capable of displaying images. In fact his earliest education and experience with programing came in the 1970s, when the world was accessing computers via an acoustical coupler, and coding was with line-numbered Fortran IV.
He's been at the forefront of emerging digital imaging technologies, and was involved at the beginnings of digital cinema as the industry transitioned from analog and chemical based imaging, into fully digital workflows. As a recognized industry guru and technology evangelist, he's embraced the continued evolution of the related arts and sciences. Reprints of some of his articles are available at generaltitles.com.
His recent credits include visual effects development & supervision, color grading, look development, film editing, and title design for feature films. Credits include work on films such as the recent live-action Beauty and the Beast for Disney. Other clients include Sony/Columbia, Warner Bros., and Universal.
His interests here with the W3, AGWG, Silver Task Force, and the Low Vision Task Force, are partly motivated by his personal struggles with low vision. His visual impairments, coupled with his extensive experience in color, typography, and visual arts & sciences make him uniquely qualified to lead the research and development of the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm project, as well as co-authoring guidelines on visual contrast and accessible readability for WCAG 3.
He's been at the forefront of emerging digital imaging technologies, and was involved at the beginnings of digital cinema as the industry transitioned from analog and chemical based imaging, into fully digital workflows. As a recognized industry guru and technology evangelist, he's embraced the continued evolution of the related arts and sciences. Reprints of some of his articles are available at generaltitles.com.
His recent credits include visual effects development & supervision, color grading, look development, film editing, and title design for feature films. Credits include work on films such as the recent live-action Beauty and the Beast for Disney. Other clients include Sony/Columbia, Warner Bros., and Universal.
His interests here with the W3, AGWG, Silver Task Force, and the Low Vision Task Force, are partly motivated by his personal struggles with low vision. His visual impairments, coupled with his extensive experience in color, typography, and visual arts & sciences make him uniquely qualified to lead the research and development of the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm project, as well as co-authoring guidelines on visual contrast and accessible readability for WCAG 3.
Andrew participates in:
Miriam Suzanne
Miriam is a web developer, designer, author, and musician — co-founder of OddBird, Teacup Gorilla, and Grapefruit Lab. She has taught for the Mozilla Developer channel, and is a staff writer for CSS Tricks, co-author of Jump Start Sass, member of the Sass & CSS Remedy core teams, and creator of the Susy and True open source tools.
Miriam participates in:
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Bobby Tung W3C Evangelist - Publishing, Taiwan
I started to participate W3C activities with "Requirement of Chinese Text and Layout", an i18n project.
Now I'm W3C Evangelist in Taiwan to spread recent W3C standardization activities to Web Industry, and recruit member in Digital Publishing area and Banking, Telecommunications.
Bobby participates in:
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Makoto Ueki
Web Accessibility Consultant in Japan. Makoto has been contributing to the JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) Working Group and W3C/WAI AG Working Group as a web accessibility expert. And he has been a chairman of the Web accessibility Committee in Japan (WAIC) since 2012.
IAAP - Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) and Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) since 2017.
Makoto participates in:
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Rob van Eijk Technologist (DPA, ePrivacy, GDPR)
Rob worked on privacy in the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) Privacy Program. He contributed to the Tracking Protection Working Group, representing the European data protection authorities assembled in the Article 29 Working Party (WP29).
Rob participates in:
Lea Verou Invited Expert, CSS WG
Lea is currently working as a Human-Computer Interaction researcher at MIT CSAIL and is an Invited Expert in the CSS Working Group. She previously worked at W3C between 2012-2013 as part of the W3C Developer relations and Web education efforts.
She has a long-standing passion for open web standards and enjoys researching, blogging and speaking about them. She has released a number of popular open source tools to help web developers learn and use open web standards.
Lea participates in:
Luis Villa
Attorney in private practice, focused on intellectual property. Previously: Deputy General Counsel at Wikimedia; Open Source Initiative board member; author of Mozilla Public License (v 2.0); QA and software team manager at Ximian, Novell, and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law.
Luis participates in:
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Michele Williams Owner, MAW Consulting, LLC
Dr. Michele A. Williams is owner of M.A.W. Consulting, LLC - Making Accessibility Work. Her 16 years of experience include influencing top tech companies as a Senior User Experience (UX) Researcher and Accessibility Consultant, and obtaining a PhD in Human-Centered Computing focused on accessibility. An international speaker, published academic author, and patented inventor, she is passionate about educating and advising on technology that does not exclude disabled users.
Michele participates in:
Johannes Wilm PhD, Anthropology
Johannes (German/Danish/Swedish) has studied social sciences and humanities with a focus on the Americas, Politics, and History in Norway, the UK and Sweden. He has conducted fieldwork in Douglas, Arizona and Nicaragua for extended periods of time and has lived in several Latin American countries. To pay for his other activities, he started doing (open source) web development with and has tried several times to create academic writing systems for non-technically inclined users so that others could take over more of his technical responsibilities in the creation of academic journals.
Since 2012 he has worked on the web-based editor Fidus Writer, and in the process he has found that it made a lot of sense to connect with other, larger JavaScript editors to push for improvements in this area and to engage with browser makers through the W3C. Johannes is therefore mainly active in the Editing Taskforce.
Johannes participates in:
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Rachel Yager W3C Evangelist - Financial Innovation
Dr. Rachel Yager is the founder of FortuneTimes Group (FTG) 运时国际集团 a New York management consulting firm that accelerates international business growth – in startups and Fortune 500 companies – with state-of-the-art business techniques, emerging technologies and global best practice. Dr. Yager is also the founder of SymposiumX which brings together a community of W3C members and industry thought leaders in building the next generation of emerging technologies and standards for financial innovation.
Rachel participates in:
Kaliya Young Identity Woman
Kaliya is widely known as "Identity Woman" an independent advocate for the rights and dignity of our digital selves. In 2005 she co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop and in 2021 she co-founded the Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop. She works to build multi-stakeholder collaborations to solve hard techno-social challenges in community. She is the author of two books the Domains of Identity (2020) and A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity (2018) along with many articles and reports. In 2017 she received a Master of Science in Identity Management and Security from the University of Texas at Austin. She is an instructor in Computer Information Systems at Merritt College in Oakland, California.
Kaliya participates in:
