Rick Smith

Richard E. (Rick) Smith was first introduced to computers in the 1950s when his father took him to the unveiling of a Univac supercomputer. It used transistors and magnetic tapes. After receiving a B.S. in engineering from Boston University, Rick worked on pioneering speech recognition systems, and then on high-performance routers for the ARPANET. Rick earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Minnesota, working on fault tolerant robotics. Rick joined Secure Computing Corporation in the early 1990s to help develop LOCK, an NSA-sponsored project to build a high security computer system. This inspired a series of security products for Internet email and the World Wide Web. In 2003, Rick joined the faculty of the University of St. Thomas where he established their undergraduate major in information security. Rick is now retired, but still works on educational projects including his occasional blog, Cryptosmith. He remains a part-time lecturer for the University of Minnesota's Software Engineering Center and its masters program in software engineering. Rick has published three books on cybersecurity, plus numerous articles and papers. He is a senior member of the ACM and IEEE. Rick is also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional.