Lee Hollaar, Ph.D.

Recruitment and Screening Panel

Lee A. Hollaar is a Professor in the School of Computing (formerly the Department of Computer Science) at the University of Utah. Professor Hollaar's interests include text handling and retrieval, distributed systems and data communciations, and intellectual property and computer law. He is author of a new treatise, "Legal Protection of Digital Information," which covers copyrights and patents for computer software and other digital works, published by BNA Books and available on the Internet at no cost )digital-law-online.info). He received his BS degree in electrical engineering in 1969 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his PhD in computer science in 1975 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hollaar was on the faculty of the University of Illinois prior to joining the faculty of the University of Utah in 1980. He has taken a number of courses at the University of Utah's law school. Professor Hollaar was on sabbatical leave in Washington, DC, during the 1996-97 academic year as a Committee Fellow in the intellectual property unit of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate and as a visiting scholar with Circuit Judge Randall R. Rader at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He advised the Dole presidential campaign on technology and intellectual property policy issues. Professor Hollaar was one of the drafters of the Utah Digital Signature Act, which made Utah the first government in the world to recognize digital signatures as equivalent to handwritten ones. On November 19, 1997, as part of Utah's Digital Signature Day, Professor Hollaar executed the first legally recognized digitally signed will in the world. He is the co-inventor of a new method of rapidly searching text stored on a disk, and was the primary architect for a distributed, workstation-based information retrieval system. His past research has also included work on avionics and navigation systems. He was Director of Campus Networking during the development of the University's campus-wide data communications network, and remains involved with distributed systems and telephony. Dr. Hollaar is on the panel of arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association and the Better Business Bureau, is a Registered Professional Engineer (Control Systems) in California, and was formerly a Designated Engineering Representative (Systems and Equipment) for the Federal Aviation Administration. Dr. Hollaar is a senior member of the IEEE, and served as Vice-Chair of its Intellectual Property Committee. He was the primary author of its University Intellectual Property Guidelines. He is also a member of ACM, and was the vice-chair of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.