Faculty & Staff
Seymour E. Goodman
Professor
Co-Director - CISTP
Seymour (Sy) E. Goodman is Professor of International Affairs and Computing, jointly at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Goodman is also Co-Director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy and Associate Director for Policy of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC). Before moving to Georgia Tech in January 2000, he was director of the Consortium for Research on Information Security and Policy at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
Prof. Goodman's research interests include international developments in the information technologies (IT), technology diffusion, IT and national security, and related public policy issues. His areas of geographic interest include the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa. His earlier research included the areas of statistical and continuum physics, combinatorial algorithms, and software engineering. Dr. Goodman's current work includes research on the global diffusion of the Internet and the protection of large IT-based infrastructures.
From 1970-1981, Dr. Goodman was a at the University of Virginia (Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Soviet and East European Studies). He was a visiting Professor at Princeton University (Mathematics, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) from 1977-1980, and in 1979 was a visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (Economics). From 1981-2000, he was Professor of Management Information Systems and a member of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona.
Prof. Goodman is Contributing Editor for International Perspectives for Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's oldest and largest professional society for computing, and has served with many government, academic, professional society, and industry advisory and study groups, including as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense on the drafting and revision of the DoD Critical Infrastructure Plan. He served as a recognized advisor to the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) and organized a series of workshops to assist the Commission, and served as chair of a National Research Council meeting on Technical Responses to Cyber-attack and their Legal Implications. He served as a member of the Defense Science Board Task Force that recommended that the ARPANET go public which led to the establishment of today's Internet.
His research pursuits have taken him to all seven continents and 80 countries, and he has provided Ministerial-level briefings in many countries including Cuba, Egypt, Israel, Nepal, the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zambia. He has also testified before the U.S. Congress.
Although Prof. Goodman started his student career as an English major, he received his B.S. in engineering from Columbia University (1965) and obtained his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (1970) in applied math/mathematical physics.