Martin J. Dürst is a Professor at the Department of Integrated Information Technology, College of Science and Engineering, at Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo area, Japan). He currently heads the Intelligence and Information Course in the Graduate School of Science and Engineering. Martin's research activities include Web Architecture, Software Engineering, and Software Internationalization (how to make software work with the wide range of languages, scripts, and cultures on our planet). His teaching duties cover Computer Science subjects ranging from Algorithms and Data Structures to Web Architecture, teaching mostly in Japanese.
From Nov. 1997 to Oct. 2002 and from April 2004 to March 2005, Martin was a Project Associate Professor at Keio University (Shonan Fujisawa Campus, near Tokyo). Inbetween, he held a position as a Visiting Scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). During most of this time, Martin was Activity Lead of the Internationalization Activity of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Prior to joining W3C, Martin was Oberassistent (Senior Research Associate) at the Multimedia Lab (Director: Prof. Dr. P. Stucki) of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Zurich (Switzerland). 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 has been one of the main drivers of Internationalization and the use of Unicode in a Web and Internet context. He published the first proposals for domain name Internationalization and composite character normalization, and is the main author of the W3C Character Model and the IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier) specification. He chairs the W3C Internationalization Interest Group since 1998 and the IETF Language Tag Registry Update (ltru) Working Group from 2005 to 2009. Martin is also a member of the Review Board of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference.
Martin's latest field of interest is Ruby, a programming language of Japanese origin with amazing elegance and efficiency. Martin is contributing mostly to the Internationalization aspects of Ruby.