Fred (Rick) W. Weingarten
Fred W. Weingarten is Director of the Office for Information Technology Policy of the American Library Association, where he does research and analysis of the policy implications of new technology for libraries and librarians. He is also on the adjunct faculty of the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he teaches information policy. For the previous three years, he has held the dual positions of Senior Policy Fellow for the ALA and Director of Public Policy for the Computing Research Association (CRA), a scientific association of academic Computer Science and Engineering Departments and industrial research laboratories. For five years, he served as the first full-time Executive Director of CRA.
Before joining CRA, Dr. Weingarten served for several years as Manager of the Communication and Information Technologies Program at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency of Congress responsible for performing technology policy studies. He was responsible for over thirty studies on issues involving computers and communication systems, including R&D policy, telecommunications policy, intellectual property, privacy, security, government information policy, educational technology, the impacts of computers on banking and financial markets, and industrial and office automation.
Prior to his service at OTA, he was a program director in the Computer Science Division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). As Program Director for Special Projects, he funded important early research in areas of social impacts, including privacy, systems security, human interface. He also managed NSF's early networking programs. Before joining NSF, Dr. Weingarten directed the joint academic computer center and taught computer science at The Claremont Colleges.
He
earned a BS in engineering at the California Institute of Technology and an MS
and Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science at Oregon State University. After
graduation, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lawrence Laboratory at
Livermore.
Dr. Weingarten has served on advisory groups for the National Science Foundation, the State Department and the Defense Department, and is an advisor to the Canadian Foundation for Innovation on their information technology research and application funding programs. He serves on the federal government Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board. He has spoken and written extensively on information technology policy. The Association for Computing Machinery named him an ACM Fellow in recognition of his contributions to information and technology policy.