 In September 2018, Lunde was awarded the Bulldog Award at Internationalization & Unicode Conference 42.Since 2018 Lunde has been a technical director of the Unicode Consortium and a vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.Ken Lunde chose the penname “Ken Kobayashi” () in 1985, a combination of "gikun" (, reading of a kanji by meaning) and "ateji" (, kanji used as phonetic symbol regardless of meaning) concepts.