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Frank Fitzsimmons

Frank Fitzsimmons is the Chief Operating Officer for Iridian Technologies, the exclusive developer of biometric authentication and identification technology based on patents for iris recognition.

Prior to joining Iridian, Frank was Senior Vice President, Global Marketing for Dun & Bradstreet, where he is responsible for the implementation of new global marketing initiatives in the areas of access systems, software and consulting partner marketing, Internet applications, electronic markets, and value-added products. Mr. Fitzsimmons was Vice President, Applications Marketing (1994-96), where he was responsible for the development of new products and new markets for D&B-U.S. In this role, he managed "start-up" type teams to develop strategies, products and distribution capabilities. He was also Vice President, Finance for the Business Marketing Services Division and Vice President, Strategic Planning for D&B Information Services, North America.

Previously, he held positions in Finance and Planning for Amerada Hess and the international divisions of W.R. Grace & Co. Mr. Fitzsimmons hold a Bachelors degree in accounting from Ithaca College and a M.B.A. degree in finance from Columbia University.

He was appointed as one of ICANN's nine initial directors in October 1998 and served until 15 Dec 2002.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."