He initiated and taught the first course on computer security in a regular accredited degree program in the United States at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and established the computer security program there and at GW and led GW’s to national recognition as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education.
He also directed the National Science Foundation computer security scholarship programs ("CyberCorps") at GW.
A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Hoffman has served on a number of Advisory Committees including those of the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Federal Trade Commission, and the ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, and has occasionally testified before Congress on security and privacy-related issues.
[1] Dr. Hoffman was co-editor of a special section of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on electronic voting in 2000 and wrote one of the early reports on issues with electronic voting in 1987, funded by a grant from the Markle Foundation.
He also developed a personal computer-based risk analysis system, RISKCALC, that was a commercial product for a short time [3].