Our Current Program Committee Members

Hameed Afssari is a multi-disciplinary globalization veteran with a long history of leadership in the localization industry. His focus is on improving the localization process and tooling to provide service to millions of users worldwide in their own language. Hameed currently serves as head of globalization at Uber and has also led effective teams of onsite and remote engineers in raising the quality bar of internationalization and localization at Microsoft for over 100 languages. Hameed not only defines software product requirements globally but also educates and empowers teams through training and tools while measuring progress via metrics to empower data-driven decision-making.

Adam Bittlingmayer is co-founder and CEO of ModelFront. ModelFront is accelerating translation safely, by providing private custom LLMs for automatic post-editing and quality prediction. High-volume, high-quality buyers use AI from ModelFront to fully automate millions of words at human quality.

Adam was previously an engineer at Google Translate within Google Research, and also has experience building products like Android and Adobe Creative Suite. He also founded the Machine Translate Foundation – open information and community to make machine translation more accessible.

Anne-Marie Colliander Lind is a recognized force in the global language industry landscape. She has spent almost 30 years helping multinational organizations solve their language issues, serving in executive sales and management positions at leading service, technology and market research companies. She is the CEO of Inkrease, a management consulting company based in Sweden that assists companies in their growth and development strategies. Anne-Marie is a sought-after speaker and is engaged part-time as marketing director for LocWorld. She is also the co-organizer of the Nordic Translation & Interpretation Forum (NTIF).

Daniel Goldschmidt is a speaker and educator with software internationalization and localization expertise. He also teaches computer science and physics to middle and high school students, driven by his belief that investing in the next generation is vital for humanity’s future.

Previously, Daniel was a senior internationalization project manager at Microsoft, leading the internationalization team in the Cloud and Enterprise Division. Before that, he co-founded RIGI Localization Solutions, a venture focused on visual localization, and served as a senior software engineer on Google’s internationalization team. He is Vice-Chair of the LocWorld Program Committee and has been a member of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference review committee. Daniel frequently presents at international events and leads workshops and roundtables. He holds a BS in computer science and mathematics (cum laude) and an MS in computes cience from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ulrich Henes is the founder and president of The Localization Institute, a Madison, Wisconsin-based consulting and event organizing company. Already in his early years, Ulrich was fascinated by language, cultural differences, and global business. He spent the first decade of his career organizing international campaigns against the arms race and apartheid; and promoting global social justice. For the past 25 years Ulrich has channeled his passion for all things global into promoting awareness and respect for differences among people, countries, and languages in the international business community.

Katell Jentreau has more than twenty years of experience in localization, both on the vendor and client sides. She led the globalization effort at Box for three years, before joining Netflix’s Globalization team in 2015 as the company was getting ready to launch globally. At the start of 2024, Katell joined Expedia Group where she has been leading the centralized Globalization function for all Expedia brands. From 2013 to 2015, she was also on the board of Women in Localization and has remained a member and volunteer ever since.

Donna Parrish is co-organizer of the LocWorld conferences. She was publisher of the magazine MultiLingual for 18 years. Prior to her work at MultiLingual Computing, Inc., she was a computer programmer for 25 years. Donna holds a degree in mathematics from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She is presently the secretary of CLEAR Global (Translators without Borders) and CLEAR Tech.

With 22 years in localization, Kirill has been deeply focused on Translation Quality Management and its automation for the past 10 — as a co-founder, CEO, and CPO of a localization technology company. His most recent interest is simplifying the benchmarking of language AI (LLM and NMT) output quality across various multilingual use cases such as translation, LQA, and more. Formerly a Global Director of Localization at a Unicorn tech company. he’s based in Tallinn, Estonia, Northern Europe. In his spare time, Kirill plays, teaches, and promotes Irish traditional music.

Erik drives innovation at Argos Multilingual by nurturing strategic growth and fusing customer needs with robust technology solutions. By fostering scalability and seamless integrations, solutions meet customer demands and elevate team performance and company growth.

Erik’s passionate about crafting solutions, grounded in a comprehensive understanding of business realities and finding practical applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation. The mission is to develop business models that are viable and deeply embedded in a core value proposition that resonates with global markets.

Peng Wang has been teaching, researching and practicing localization on three continents. She is the convener for EDUinLOC, a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa, and a freelance conference interpreter with the Translation Bureau of the Canadian government. Peng began conducting corpus-based translation studies at the University of Liverpool and later she worked in the Corpus Research Lab at Northern Arizona University. She is an expert in approaching technology in the context of culture and humanities. Peng’s current research interests include human learning vs. machine learning, machine translation risk management, terminology and multilingual data analysis.

Jenny Webb is a seasoned project manager with production experience in board games as well as publishing. She is focused on developing company processes, improving communication, and refining workflows while providing growth-oriented leadership and cultivating long-term strategic vision. Her focus is an emphasis on international collaboration, technology integration, and a holistic, top to bottom approach to operations in order to support schedule optimization throughout product development.

George Zhao is the founder and CEO of VideoLocalize, a video dubbing technology provider, and Boffin Language Group, a localization service provider. With over 25 years in the language industry, he is a serial entrepreneur passionate about driving innovation. Zhao currently leads the development of VideoLocalize, an advanced video dubbing platform that won the first LocWorld Process Innovation Challenge in 2017 and received TAUS Game Changer Innovation Awards in 2016 and 2017. Actively engaged in the industry, he served on the 2017–2018 board of directors for the Globalization & Localization Association (GALA), helping to shape the future of localization.