Profile: maui1

Frank Catanzaro is a visionary yet pragmatic futurist.  He is a co-founder and senior partner in the Arcturus Research & Design Group, and a charter member of the Millennium Project, an internationally recognized think tank for Global Foresight research he is chair of it’s experimental cyber-node.

He attributes much of his success to his engineering education at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  Lucky enough to be at WPI during the latter half of the tumultuous ‘60s, he was one of the first products of a bold initiative in the transformation of engineering education called the WPI Plan.  Even at this early age, he had an unerring intuition for and attraction to the cutting edge of change.  His course of study was equal parts engineering basics, artificial intelligence, transpersonal psychology, organizational development, and graphic arts, pursued at WPI, Clark University, the School of the Worcester Art Museum, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Continuing on a path of lifelong learning, he was affected greatly by his mentors, John Platt, Manfred Kochen, and Willis Harman, and the ideas of Erich Jantsch, William Irwin Thompson, Magoroh Maruyama, Ted Nelson, and Buckminster Fuller.

Clients such as the Hudson Institute, Fujitsu, Harvard Institute for International Development, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Sprint, Perot Systems, Arlington Institute, the Waitt Foundation for Community Development, and the Nation of Cape Verde, have sought his innovative leading edge solutions, interdisciplinary insights, collaborative strategies and insightful perspectives.

Frank’s pioneering work integrating computer and communications technologies with new social inventions, won a first prize award in the Kawasaki, Japan International design competition for Advanced Information Cities.  His early pioneering work in computer Mediated Communications was cited by the International Studies Association for its groundbreaking implications for transnational communications and nuclear peacekeeping.

Frank’s public sector work has included consulting on a National Library of Congress study on the role of hypermedia in the libraries future, participation in the Congressional Peace Academy hearings, and being appointed as a voting delegate to the White House conference on Libraries and Information Systems.

His current work with the American Council of the United Nations University and its Millennium Project involves researching the state of the art in online collaboration tools and cyber futures.  Specifically his focus is on web services, the semantic and ontologic web, distributed grid, mesh, and ad hoc computing as drivers for the emergence of new social and economic futures