Profile of Roger Clarke

Roger Clarke studied in the Faculty of Commerce at the University of N.S.W., Sydney between 1967 and 1975, concentrating on the then very new discipline of information systems. His career began with 17 years in professional, managerial and consulting roles in the information technology industry, in Sydney, London and Zürich. He then decided on what he mistakenly thought would be a contemplative life in a university, taking up the position of Reader in Information Systems at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1984.

For many years his professional, consultancy and then research work was primarily in commercial application software technology and its management. More recently he has extended his interests to include many different organisational, economic, legal and social aspects of IT.

Since 1988, he has directed a Research Programme in 'Supra-Organisational Systems'. This has involved work in the areas of EFTS, EDI, on-line trading, smart cards, and during the last two years, policy aspects of the emergent national and global information infrastructure. EDI sub-projects have included a 5-year longitudinal study of its application by Australian government agencies, now being replicated in Germany, and domestic and comparative study of EDI in international trade. He has established and sustains a number of important international collaborations.

Another long involvement has been in information privacy and dataveillance issues, both as researcher and advocate. His Communications of the ACM paper on data surveillance is the primary reference in the area. He has also researched and published on specific techniques such as computer matching, profiling and human identification. His recent piece on the significance of Asimov's Laws of Robotics fiction, in IEEE Computer, attracted worldwide attention.

In addition to teaching and research, he has sustained contact with business and government through applied research and consulting, and professional and managerial seminars. He has been an active member of the Australian Computer Society for many years, an A.C.S. Fellow since 1985, and was an Australasian ComputerWorld Fellow in 1992. He is variously referee for, and editorial advisory board member of, a variety of important IT journals.

To cope with the inanities of life among the amateurish but highly dedicated politicians of academe, he consoles himself with quantities of quality red wine. He occasionally terrorises his family by dragging them off to German-speaking countries, including Guest Professorships at the Universities of Bern in Switzerland and Linz in Austria, interspersed with lingually much easier visits to North America and the United Kingdom. The exploits of which he is proudest were those as a goalkeeper, and he continues his association with soccer both as a referee and as a couch-potato.

[Footnote: He abandoned the Department of Commerce at the A.N.U. on 31 July 1995, and has returned to full-time consultancy, maintaining his links with academe via the A.N.U.'s Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology, and its MBA Programme].


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Last Amended: 15 October 1995


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Engineering and Information Technology,
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