“How to keep your computer (and you) safe” is the topic of the next Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory monthly noon lecture meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 14.

The speaker will be James A. “Jim” Rome, a retired ORNL researcher who has expertise on computer security and is a webmaster for several nonprofit organizations, including FORNL.

He will deliver his lecture at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Attendees may bring their own lunch to eat. To view the virtual noon lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.

“Computer crime is a multi-trillion dollar business,” Rome said. “Unfortunately, the bad guys are winning. I will speak on how to proactively take steps to remain safe on the internet and how to protect your devices.”

Rome, who calls himself “a computer security paranoid,” spent the latter part of his career at ORNL providing computer security for classified systems.

After receiving four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started his career in 1971 at ORNL as a theoretical plasma physicist with the Fusion Energy Division, where he conducted research for 25 years. He specialized in doing configuration design and following charged particle orbits in fusion devices.

In the 1970s when personal computers first became available, Rome co-write a scientific graphics program, called GraphiC, for PCs.

He later moved to ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division, where he specialized in air traffic analysis and worked on making computer workstations “multi-level secure.”

He managed ORNL computer security for the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a high-speed network that connected supercomputers and facilities at many universities. He also created a public key infrastructure to enable secure, encrypted logins and access to online Lab Notebooks.

Rome is author or co-author of 155 publications, and a fellow of the American Physical Society.  You can learn more about him on his jamesrome.net website.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Keeping your computer safe is…