Vitae

Academic Background

Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Cleveland, OH

Master of Science in Computer Engineering & Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering with concentrations in Psychology and Philosophy (Cognitive Science)

Graduate course work in operating systems, computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, algorithms, data structures, computer graphics, and human-computer interfaces. Other class work in human intelligence and cognitive science

Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity: President, Alumni Chair, Philanthropy Chair

Intramurals: soccer, table tennis

The Peddie School, Hightstown, NJ

High School Diploma

Advanced Placement in Computer Science and Calculus

Extracurriculars: Librarian, Outing Club (Vice President, Quartermaster), Astronomy Club (President), Alumni Office (volunteer)

Gordonstoun International Summer School, Elgin, Scotland

Colégio Andrews, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Affiliations & Activities

ACSA Senior Fellow, since 2012
IEEE Senior Member, since 2000
ACM Member, since 2016
AAAS Member, since 2016
Internet Society Member, since 1993
SCORE Mentor, 2003-2020
First Run Angel (Investment) Group - Board of Advisors, 2002-2008, 2015-2016
OWASP Member, 2008-2015
e-Peaks Technology Group - Board of Directors, 2001-2004
Co-Chairman - User Interface Symposium, 1993
Chairman - Special Interest Group on Networked Information Discovery & Retrieval (SIGNIDR V), 1994
Chairman - Foreign Language Technology Symposium, 1996
Chairman (2011-2012), Organizing Committee Member (since 1998), Steering Committee Member (since 2011), Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)
Organizing Committee Member, New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW), 2007
Keynote Speaker, Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems (EATIS), 2012
Coach/Mentor, Explorers FIRST Lego League (FLL) Robotics Team, 2013-2017
Coordinator, Robert Frost Public Charter School Explorers Club (Robotics/STEM), 2012-2013
Big Data Analytics, Session Chair @ ACSAC 2017
Web-based Applications Security, Session Chair @ ACSAC 2008
Mobile Security, Session Chair @ ACSAC 2009
Review Committee Member - IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference 2018
Review Committee Member - International Workshop on Internationalisation of Products and Systems (IWIPS), 2003
North Conway Library - Technical Consultant, 2001-2002
Book reviewer:
- Managing Internet Information Services, O'Reilly & Associates
- Complete Idiot's Guide to the Internet, MacMillan Publishing
Other Former Associations:
- Cognitive Science Society
- Internet Developers Association (IDA)
- International Webmasters Association
- International Society of Internet Professionals (ISIP)
- American Library Association(ALA)
- ALA Library and Information Technology Association (LITA)
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- ACM Human-Computer Interface (SIGCHI)
- ACM Graphics (SIGGRAPH)
- American Translators Association (ATA)
- Apple Library Users Group (ALUG)

Languages

English - fluent
Portuguese - fluent but a little rusty (native speaker)
Spanish - some reading and speaking
French (5 years) and Hebrew (2 years) - long forgotten

Papers & Presentations

Blockchain and FinTech Innovation Initiatives, FinTech4Good's Blockchain4SDGs, 2017
CyberSecurity Future: AI, Big Data, and the Promise of a More Secure Tomorrow, National Defense University, 2016
Creating Your Own $uccess with Crowdfunding, 2014
Imagining the Future: Technology Innovation in the Internet Age, Keynote - Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems (EATIS), 2012
Keeping Your Web Apps Secure (see Courses above), ACSAC 2010, ACM CCS 2010, PST 2011, ACSAC 2011, ACSAC 2012
Enterprise Shared Services Concept of Operations (CONOPs), co-author, 2012
CMS Enterprise Shared Services Business, Data, and IT Plan, co-author, 2012
Enterprise Shared Services Functional Architecture, co-author, 2012
Statement of Objectives for Enterprise Identity Management (EIDM) Services, co-author, 2011
Cloud Computing: Beyond the Hype, 2010
Continuity of Assessment Record and Evaluation (CARE) Health Information Exchange (C-HIEP) Security Systems Engineering Plan, co-author, 2009
Overview of Continuity of Assessment Record and Evaluation (CARE) Security, Privacy, and Processes, co-author, 2009
WebAppSec (see Courses above), ACSAC 2008-9, ACM CCS 2009, OWASP AppSec DC 2009/10/12, OWASP AppSec USA 2011, ISS 2011
Conceptual View of the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update (RHQDAPU) Program, co-author, 2007
Independent Assessment of the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update (RHQDAPU) Program: Findings and Recommendations, co-author, 2007
Internet Secrets of the (soon to be) Rich & Famous, 2004
The Highest Wireless Network (WiFi - 802.11b) in the Northeast US, 2003
Web & Search Engine Optimization, 2003
Securing Online Banking Transactions, 2002
A Taxonomy for Off-the-Shelf Consumer Software, 2000
Internet-wide Vulnerability Assessments, 1999
Security Assessment of commercial biometric and smart card products, 1999
Enabling Access to Subsets of Networked Resources in Partially Trusted Networks, Intelink 2000, 1998
OSIS International: A Technical Case Study, NATO Conference, 1998
Executable Content: Mobile Code in the Age of the Web, 1998
A Code Signing Reference Implementation ConOps and Config Guide, 1998
A Brown Bag's Worth of Information on Executable Content, 1999
CAPCO Labeling Demonstration Concept of Operations and Test Report, 1998
Multilingual Computing and Information Retrieval, NATO BICES Information Systems Management Conference, 1997
Developing an Information Infrastructure, accepted at INET, 1995
Web in the Enterprise, World-Wide Web Conference Darmstadt, 1995
Net Culture, Annual Review of Communications, 1994-5
The Net Culture, The Telecommunications Review, 1994
National Information Infrastructure Phase 0: The Internet?, CIS Breakfast Series, 1994
Internet Information Playground, Eastern Communications Forum, 1994
Internet Resources, Online Working Group, 1994
Integrated View of the Battlespace demonstration
Internet & NII, National Contract Managers Association Keynote, 1994
How to modify WAIS source files for use with firewalls, 1993
Intro to Internet, Internet Tools Administration; training materials
Proceedings of the User Interface Symposium, 1993
ADNET Open Systems Application (OSA) Integration Guidance, 1993
C4I for the Warrior demonstration, 1993
Distributed Information Query & Navigation, 1993
Of URIs, HTML, and HTTP, 1993
Networked Information Discovery & Retrieval, 1993
Hobbes' Internet Picks, monthly column appearing in PRISM and Networking Center newsletters, 1992-1993
ISLES: Information System for Law Enforcement Support, 1992
Graphical Simulation of Ion Flow Through a Neuron's Membrane (Computational Neuroscience), 1992
The Design and Implementation of a Distributed Decision Making Tool, 1992
POGO: Proteus-Orion Graphical Objects, 1990
Object-Oriented Programming Systems (OOPS) / Event-Driven Simulations, 1990
Art Manager - A Database Driven Art Gallery Management System, 1989
Natural Language Understanding & Knowledge Representation, 1988
IETF RFC 2235: Hobbes' Internet Timeline, maintained for 25 years. Translated into numerous languages, and printed/cited in thousands of magazines, books, and web sites, including:
- Magazines: BYTE, Science, Internet World, Network World
- Newspapers: Le Monde Informatique, Washington Technology, Financial Times, US News & World Report
- Books: Top Secret Intranet, The Internet Business Journal, Internet for Legal Research, Business on the Infobahn, The Computer in the Visual Arts

Recognition and Awards

Senior Fellow, ACSA, 2014
Senior Member, IEEE, 2001
Recognition Award, Open Source Information System (OSIS) International, 1998
"Your efforts have resulted in a solution that allows International ... access securely using low-cost commercial technologies in an innovative manner"
Recognition Award, Bilateral Collaboration System (BCS) - Intelink-J, 1998
"[The client's] work load has been reduced by between 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours per day. They're are no longer coming in at 4 or 5 am ... and they have stopped coming in on Sunday."
"Your contributions ... are indicative of the type of behavior that adds value and reflects well on MITRE"
Director's Distinguished Accomplishment Award, Web Machine Translation (WebMT), 1996
"Despite an extremely aggressive schedule, and a limited budget, The ... Team rapidly defined, designed, and deployed" "Working with initially vague requirements, the indefatigable ... Team worked long hours to ensure an excellent product which received customer praise"
Director's Distinguished Accomplishment Award, MITRE Information Infrastructure (MII), 1995
Program Achievement Award, Intelligence Coverage and Capabilities Database (CCDB), 1994
Special Recognition Award, NASA Spacelink Interface Study, 1993
"Your contributions were outstanding and performed under difficult conditions, including short turnaround time and limited funds. Your participation was critical to the success"
Case Alumni Scholarship, 1986-1990

Teaching

Lean & Agile Product Strategy Development for Cross-Functional Teams, U.S. Government, 2016
Keeping Your Web Apps Secure: The OWASP Top 10 & Beyond, Zakon Group, 2010-2012
WebAppSec: Developing Secure Web Applications, Zakon Group, 2008-2011
Web Authoring (computer/web-based training), DoD, 1996
Internet Tools Administration, MITRE Institute & Sponsors, 1993-1995
Internet for Users, MITRE Institute & Sponsors, 1993-1995
Net Surfing 101, MITRE Institute & Sponsors, 1994
Macintosh 101 & 201, CWRU Weatherhead School of Management, 1991-1992
Introduction to Programming, CWRU undergraduate, 1986-1987
Pascal Programming & Style, CWRU graduate & staff, 1987

Work Experience

Zakon Group LLC

Founding Partner, 2001 to Present

Sample Clients: Cyber Defense Agency, Appalachian Mountain Club, Clean Air Task Force, Mount Washington Observatory, MITRE Corporation

Sample Projects:

Lead Developer, OpenConf peer-review and abstract management web application used by thousands of events in over 100 countries
Technical Advisor, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ICT21 $2billion procurement
Technical Lead, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Continuity Assessment Record & Evaluation (CARE) As-Is assessment and To-Be security systems engineering plan for the national exchange of electronic health records (EHR)
Technical Advisor, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Enterprise Identity Management (EIDM) and Enterprise Shared Services (ESS), implementing a solution for 100M+ users
Developer and integrator of public, intranet and extranet web sites, applications, and collaborative tools
Consultant on enterprise architectures
Developer of web-based e-commerce systems
Integrator of the highest Wi-Fi network in the northeastern US, spanning 8Km of backcountry in support of remote sensing and imagery
Technical Lead, Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update (RHQDAPU) Assessment for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

White House, Washington, DC

Presidential Innovation Fellow, May 2016 to April 2017

The Presidential Innovation Fellows program brings the principles, values, and practices of the innovation economy into government by pairing talented, diverse technologists and innovators with top civil-servants and change-makers working at the highest levels of the federal government to tackle some of the United States' biggest challenges.

Selected Activities:

Innovator-in-Residence, U.S. Department of the Treasury (FinTech, blockchain, distributed ledgers, identity, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, cyber governance)
Product Strategy and Visioning Trainer, Digital Acquisition Accelerator Pilot (agile, procurement)
Mentor, #HackThePayGap
Lecturer, National Defense University (cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data)
Advisor, initiatives on open data, open access, and cross-agency innovation

SoftZoo.com, Reston, VA

Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, July 1999 to July 2001

SoftZoo.com was an early cloud computing company and SaaS provider.

Set the vision for SoftZoo's service, expanding the original company goals to encompass lacking market segments
Tech Lead in raising over $1M from angels and VCs
Led all aspects of agile development and operations; always coming under budget and ahead of schedule
Hiring and managing responsibility for technical organization, largest in company

The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA

Principal Engineer & Internet Evangelist, June 1992 to September 1999

MITRE is a not-for-profit organization devoted to research, development, engineering, and scientific activities in the public interest. MITRE also houses several Federally-Funded R&D Centers.

Information Systems Security Group:

Led several teams investigating key storage issues in NT/IE, secure PDF products, and the use of biometric and smart card devices with public-key infrastructures.
Performed analysis of foreign Internet infrastructures and national wide-area Internet vulnerabilities.
Designed a guard capability to enable the automated transfer of Web data between networks of different classifications.
Representative to the Intelligence Community XML Study Group and Technical Working Team.
Led the security code review of a GOTS application.
Prototyped a web-based, security label document management system that provided a means of binding metadata with documents and the first proxy-level digital signature verification mechanism.
Provided policy guidance to the US intelligence community on the use of mobile code.
Prototyped a PKI-based reference implementation for code signing, and evaluated various mobile code security products such as Finjan, Digitivity Cage, Security-7 SafeGate, Network Associate WebScanX.

Tech Ambassador:

Spent one year at MITRE sites around the world prototyping new capabilities, educating engineers and managers on emerging technologies and facilitating collaboration with their corporate counterparts.
Locations: South Korea (USFK), Hong Kong, Hawaii (PACOM/USCINCPAC), Japan (USFJ), Germany (EUCOM)

Commands, Technology & Intelligence Integration Group:

Led the deployment of a multi-national network for the sharing of open sources among the intelligence components of various countries. Brought in to jumpstart this stalled program with responsibility for both the design and implementation of the network and information infrastructures, and lead technical discussions with government officials of participating and interested countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, UK). Program Award
Developed an information infrastructure (Intelink-J) for US Forces Japan (USFJ-J2) bilateral network. This included a complete intranet design/development, as well as providing various bilingual (English/Japanese) capabilities such as the integration of language translators and dictionaries with the web. Also supported KeenEdge'98 with development of a web-based RFI tracking system. Program Award
Researched streaming and multicasting technologies for MITRE-wide and potential sponsor deployment of live and on-demand audio/video.
Coordinated various technical exchange meetings with academia and industry, including SUN, Netscape, Microsoft, Oracle, ...
Developed web-based training (WBT/CBT) for Intelink authors.
Led design and development of the MITRE Information Infrastructure (MII), one of the first corporate intranet. The MII integrated MITRE's distributed information spaces with the purpose of enhancing information sharing and access across the corporation, including publishing/profiling/browsing/searching of documents, briefings, projects, financial data, etc. Director's Distinguished Accomplishment Award
Led design of the FLCommunity Intranet, a 3-tier virtual Foreign Language Community network built on Intelink, OSIS, and Internet, providing language learning, processing, and management services and resources. Concepts include multilingual computing, distributed audio/video collaboration, encodings/Unicode, virtual environments, ...
Led the integration of Systran's machine translation system with WWW and e-mail, including support for multiple encoding formats. Translation of 9 languages to English with multiple glossaries. Director's Distinguished Accomplishment Award
Technical consultant for UNOJUST, a prototype for sharing information across 13 UN Criminal Justice institutes from around the world using the Internet. Integrated Globalink machine translation system with WWW; developed searching mechanism across HTML and PDF. Prototype shown at 9th UN Congress for Criminal Justice in Cairo.
Developed an open source coverage & capabilities database for the US Intelligence community, under the Open Source program Program Achievement Award
Systems design consultant during the early phases of the Intelink project
Evangelized/implemented networked (distributed) information navigation, discovery, search, and retrieval servers (i.e., WAIS, Gopher, WWW) within MITRE and for sponsors
Formed the Online@MITRE working group to coordinate and lead different corporate efforts in the area of information retrieval. This effort was the genesis for the MII, MITRE's intranet
Developed a collaborative environment for the production of technical docs

Distributed C4I Systems Group:

Developed software providing a fused view of the battlefield (C4I FTW) through the integration of C2 systems
Administered Macintosh and UNIX (Solaris, HP/UX, Ultrix, A/IX) systems
User interface consultant for a team evaluating and re-designing NASA Spacelink. Special Recognition Award
Designed and developed user interface for two large-scale projects: ISLES - Information Systems for Law Enforcement Support, and DEA/IAW - Intelligent Analyst Workstation
Designed and implemented an inexpensive collaborative editing / information retrieval system across Macs, PCs, and UNIX workstations
Tested and integrated 40+ COTS and GOTS applications incl. Imagery, GIS, OA
Integrated many of the above applications on a Compartmented Modal Workstation (CMW)
Researched computer-supported collaborative work technologies

Weatherhead School of Management (WSOM/CWRU), Cleveland, OH, Dec 1990 to May 1992

Director - Distributed Decision Making Research Lab

Project coordinator and chief programmer of a distributed decision making application composed of spreadsheets, cognitive maps, text editors, and graphs which could be linked together and communicated with other users

Systems Consultant - WSOM Computer Lab and Support Group

Developed a Macintosh training program, both wrote and taught courses
Developed the WSOM Executive Information System - a knowledge base system with an intuitive, visual front-end containing information on the school's personnel, room control, key control, and equipment

Independent Consultant, Cleveland, Ohio, Jan 1988 to Dec 1990

Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital, Vascular Surgery department.

Developed a patient database / vascular diagnosis expert system.
Implemented a Vascular Journal References database

Apple Computer, Inc.

Promoted the Apple Macintosh computer line at CWRU by hosting special events/seminars, meeting with students, faculty, and administrators, and providing technical support to university organizations

NCR Corporation, Human Interface Group, Dayton, OH

Researched user interface technologies at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (Austin, TX)
Ported the POGO object-oriented graphics package to Windows

Scheele Fine Arts

Computerized the gallery's mailing list and inventory, and implemented an accounting system.

TechPool Studios

Developed an Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) interpreter for QuickDraw, and an image translator supporting various graphic formats