The Next Billion Users: Technology Barriers, Solutions, and Opportunities

Graduate of the first class of the University of Houston (UH) Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship (WCE) at Bauer College of Business, Ludmila (Mila) Golovine, years later, runs the global language solutions company she presented in her class business plan and then started in 1993. She has grown MasterWord into a top-ranked multi-million-dollar company that delivers language access and enables success of international organizations, projects, and initiatives in over 400 languages globally. Golovine, is the driving force behind MasterWord’s mission to Connect People Across Language and Culture. She is respected internationally for her innovative management processes and industry-leading client solutions. She focuses on providing clients with innovative solutions while “doing business with heart.” Golovine believes community involvement and social responsibility are at the core of a healthy corporation, making MasterWord a signatory of the UN Global Compact in 2021. She chairs the Advisory Subcommittee for the Translation and Interpretation Program at the Houston Community College; leads strategic partnerships for the Global Community Programs of Women in Localization; is a member of TBAT (Texas Business Against Human Trafficking) and the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Taskforce; and is a Founding member of the Global Coalition of Language Rights. She is actively involved in the and UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages initiatives, founding the Mayan Languages Preservation and Digitization Project in 2023, and was recently awarded the 2024 Language Advocate of the Year Award by the National Council on Interpreting in Healthcare (NCIHC). Her work has been recognized by numerous awards, including California Healthcare Interpreting Association (CHIA) Trainer of the Year Award 2021, Houston Business Journal's Women Who Mean Business Award; Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Gulf Coast Area regional winner (2023), Congressional Recognition G7 “Excellence in International Service” award, and NCIHC 2024 Language Access Champion Award.

Kirti Vashee is currently a technology evangelist for Translated Srl. He is a seasoned sales and marketing executive of technology products who has built a reputation as an evangelist for MT technology. He has been a prominent and accomplished speaker on automated translation technology in a variety of localization and globalization technology focused conferences around the world. He is a former AMTA board member and the Moderator of the largest MT related group on LinkedIn - Automated Language Translation. He is also an active blogger on MT related subjects Empty Pages

Sjur Nørstebø Moshagen is a linguist and computational linguist from Norway that has worked in academia and in the industry on keyboards, proofing tools, electronic dictionaries, speech synthesis and more for the last 30 years. During the last 20 years he has developed tools and supporting infrastructure for the Sámi languages as well as for other indigenous and minority languages.

Tex Texin is an industry thought leader and consultant specializing in software globalization services. Tex, and his consulting company XenCraft, has helped numerous companies create successful global products and guided companies in taking business to new regional markets. Tex has contributed to several internationalization standards and open source software. He is also currently a technology advisor to Translation Commons where he is architecting their Language Digitization Initiative, bringing the languages of Indigenous communities to digital systems. Most recently, Tex has been developing keyboards and related standards for Indigenous languages. Tex is a popular speaker at conferences around the world. Tex is the owner/author of the popular, instructional I18nGuy.comsite.