Roy F Rada (born June 13, 1951) is a professor emeritus whose research in computer science and information systems appeared in journal articles from 1979 [1] till 2022.

Rada's research assistant Karl Strickland[9][10] was imprisoned in 1993 for hacking in a landmark British case,[11] and his student Harold T. Martin III was arrested for security breaches.

[14] At the National Institutes of Health, Rada's team showed how various medical knowledge bases could be semi-automatically combined to improve information retrieval.

[16] One of the tools that Rada's team developed to facilitate using medical knowledge in retrieving information was spreading activation across semantic nets.

[20] Rada's book on hypertext[21] was published in paperback and also simultaneously in multiple electronic formats, including Guide and HyperTIES.