Technical Strategy
This function is our main technical programming. This is where all the technical work and leadership are housed, working on the standards which make an impact on the world.
Kazuyuki Ashimura
Principal Smart Cities / Web of Things (WoT) Specialist
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.
ashimura@w3.org
Kazuyuki's Github account
Pierre-Antoine Champin
Principal Data Strategist
Pierre-Antoine joined W3C in February 2021, as a fellow from ERCIM, then from Inria. He is a member of the Technical 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
Director, Project & Process; Senior Principal Media & Gaming Specialist
Starting in August 2025, François is responsible for project management, process execution, and chairs relationships and development.
François also takes part in on-going discussions and developments on media and entertainment on the web. This includes media capture, processing, streaming and playback, as well as gaming scenarios. He is currently staff contact for the Media Working Group, Second Screen Working Group, GPU for the Web Working Group, and Browser Testing and Tools Working Group.
On other fronts, François maintains Webref, a database of specifications with machine-readable references of CSS properties, definitions, IDL, and terms extracted from web specifications. He also co-chairs the Web Developer Experience (WebDX) Community 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.
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
VP, Global Impact; VP, W3C EMEA; Distinguished Expert, VR/AR & AI
Dominique is VP of Global Impact, VP of EMEA operations, Distinguished Expert on AR/VR and AI. He manages W3C Developer Relations, serves as W3C Community Development Lead (in charge of managing the Community Groups program), 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.
Richard Ishida
Distinguished Expert, Internationalization
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 2024. He created and led the highly popular MultilingualWeb EC project, and received a special award from the Advanced Publishing Lab in Japan for services to the Internationalization of Web Typesetting and Japanese Language Support. 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
Director, Payments
As of 1 Feb 2015, Ian leads W3C's Web Payments Activity.
Ian led the creation of the Community Groups Program in 2010, and continues to run the program with Dominique Hazaël-Massieux.
Ian provides staff support for the W3C Board of Directors.
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
Senior Principal Core Architecture Specialist
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
VP, Technical Strategy
Philippe Le Hegaret is VP, Technical Strategy, responsible for the technical mission of the Consortium. Until 2025, he was also the Project Lead, responsible to drive the work necessary to achieve technical 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. In 2015, he helped launch the Web Platform Incubator Community Group, a lightweight venue for proposing and discussing new web platform features. In 2009, he proposed a testing project, which later grew into the web-platform-tests project. 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
Distinguished Expert, Color, Graphics & Fonts
Chris is, since 2008, a W3C Technical Director. He is also W3C Staff contact for the Audio, CSS, WebFonts and PNG Working Groups. His interests include advanced 2D graphics - both vector and raster - color management, HDR, 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.
Simone Onofri
Senior Principal Security Specialist
Simone joined W3C in February 2024. He is the W3C Security Lead, playing a key part in the development of technologies to make the Web secure. Simone engages with industry and academic leaders on security issues and trends to identify and cultivate new proposals for standardization that improve security through stakeholder outreach and consensus-building.
As part of this role, Simone maintains a community of security reviewers to help with security reviews of W3C standards. Simone is also the W3C Team Contact of the Security Interest Group, Web Application Security Working Group, Web Authentication Working Group, and Federated Identity Working Group, and co-chair of the Threat Modeling Community Group
Simone is the liaison between W3C and other Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), such as the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Tzviya Siegman
Director, Sustainability; Director, North America (NA) Member Relations
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.
Tara Whalen
Principal Privacy Specialist
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
Senior Principal Accessibility Specialist
Kevin is the Senior Principal Accessibility Specialist 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. Kevin provides support and oversight of the accessibility Working Groups, collaborates on WAI strategic planning, and manages W3C accessibility support.
Xiaoqian Wu
Senior Principal Web Applications Specialist; Director, China Member Relations; Site Manager, W3C China
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
Senior Principal Internationalization Specialist
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.
