Big News
I am happy to report that I am replacing everything on this page. A recent development has given Reflex the ability to work with any taxonomy. For those who don’t know, in the context of Reflex taxonomy, is the words that the application can understand. Much of the advanced functionality of Reflex comes from its ability to understand the skills of the people working to remediate the incident, and the skills required to remediate a particular incident. The problem is that there are no standard words to describe these skills. For example, if a person has experience with antivirus and the definition for that incident calls for malware experience, to a computer that is not a match. But after many years, I figured out a way around this. If you the reader are interested in such things, the following video may be interesting. The text following the video is an explanation of my personal obsession with “cracking this nut.” This video also shows the new Reflex integration with the NICE framework. The NICE Framework (National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Workforce Framework) is a U.S. government standard for describing and categorizing the cybersecurity workforce.
History
Quantification of people has been my term for a system that allows computers to understand the differences between human beings as they relate to computer activities. To most of you, this might sound like a fairly recent concern. I was about 23 when the photo below was taken. Here is a brief history of where that expertise came from.
The photo left was taken at the 1982 NE Computer Show. I’m sitting at a booth with a CP/M-based computer from Vector Graphics. On the computer is a sign that says “Telejob,” which was an application I wrote. It was also the first online job search application. It ran on the first online networking system, which was called a BBS. It was created for a customer who was some kind of independent recruiter.
The idea was that people would create something like a résumé on the site, listing their qualifications and experience. Users looking for people would log into the site and search. I had to think about how to manage people and their qualifications beyond a byte-for-byte match. In other words, the computer had a task that involved some understanding of documents and people.
Fifteen years later, I started a company called Floater Corporation. Floater was a personal finance program for people who lived paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t a checkbook-type application like Quicken. I developed the first commercially available AI for Floater. Its goal was to understand the user and make decisions the way it believed the user would. It was another system for explaining a person to a computer.
During the 2009 recession, I started a nonprofit called the Layoff Support Network. It specifically targeted people who had remained loyal to companies for years and expected to retire from them. So they had no thoughts about résumés or online services like LinkedIn.
I was dedicated to developing a system where these people could be packaged in a way that would be attractive to the computers scanning their résumés. As a side note, the Layoff Support Network was very successful and became the largest non-government agency performing such a role. I later co-published a book called The Laid-Off Ninja, which talked about the importance of using the correct wording when describing your experience.
Twenty years after that, I founded CISOware.
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