Speakers Bureau

Oliver R. Smoot
Immediate Past Chairman
ANSI Board of Directors

Oliver R. Smoot served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Board of Directors January 2001 through December 2002. Before being elected as chairman of the ANSI Board, Mr. Smoot served in numerous ANSI leadership posts, including chair of ANSI’s Finance Committee, Organizational Member Council and Patent Group.

Mr. Smoot was elected for a two-year term of office as President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a worldwide federation of national standards bodies with representatives from 140 countries. His term of office as ISO President is January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2004.

Mr. Smoot also serves as vice-president for external voluntary standards relations of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a post to which he was appointed in 2000 to support ITI’s activities in voluntary standards domestically and internationally.

Prior to his appointment as ITI’s vice-president for external voluntary standards relations, Mr. Smoot held the post of ITI’s executive vice-president for 23 years.  During this tenure he was responsible for ITI’s internal activities including the association’s technical regulatory activities and its voluntary standards activities: the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) and the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO/IEC JTC 1, the Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology Standards of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission.

An active member of the American Bar Association for many years, Mr. Smoot currently serves as chairman of its Technical Standardization Law Committee and has previously served as chairman of the Section on Science and Technology Law. He has also served in numerous positions with the Computer Law Association, culminating as President, and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 

Oliver R. Smoot also has the rare distinction of actually being used as a standard of measure. In 1958, MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha pledges measured Boston’s Harvard Bridge using Mr. Smoot’s body as the standard of measure – eventually deeming the bridge to be 364.4 Smoot and one ear long. A plaque was added to the bridge in 1987 honoring this extraordinary event; the marks are repainted every year by Lambda Chi pledges.

Mr. Smoot has served on numerous international delegations and U.S. Governmental advisory committees.  He received a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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