Employment History

April 2004 - present : Independent security consultant.

June 2003 - March 2004 : PacketMotion, Inc : a computer security start-up.

Funded January 2004 by ONSET Ventures and Mohr, Davidow Ventures.

September 2001 - May 2003: Independent consultant.

Evaluation of massively distributed multiagent system; Computer security component of IT proposal for developing country; Participant in several potential startups; Other projects, reports and proposals.

May 1999 - August 2001: Recourse Technologies, Inc.

A start-up developing computer security software for Threat Management. Acquired by Symantec in August 2002. Products: ManTrap (a honeypot), ManHunt (Intrusion Detection and DDoS response), and TipOff (forensics, not released).

Title: Vice President, Research and Development

• Early employee (#4), with consequent contributions to early growth of company.
• System architect and lead programmer for the TipOff product. TipOff was based on the approach that I developed under the DERBI project at SRI.
  Patents: 6,647,400 & 6,826,697 & 6,996,843 & 7,032,114 & 7,065,657 & 7,085,936 & 7,203,962
• Supported the development of the other products, primarily in requirements, testing and evaluation. Used contacts to acquire sophisticated test data sets that found bugs not exercised by the existing testing.
• Supported the marketing activities for the company and the individual products. Wrote the basic whitepapers for both ManTrap and ManHunt and both of the company's published papers. Assisted Marketing Communications by identifying themes that would appeal to journalists and by translating technical details into appropriate descriptions and analogies. Significant contributor to the company's basic positioning.
• Supported sales by aggressively evangelizing the products to my contacts, many of whom were in the position of "evaluators" or "influencer." Significant sales resulted.
• Created and championed a plan to greatly expand the market for the ManTrap product by making it practical and useful to deploy more and larger clusters of them. Was pursuing government funding for much of this work.

1983-1999: SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute).

Note: At SRI, researchers routinely work on multiple projects, with senior staff having leadership/management roles on their primary projects.

Title: Senior Computer Scientist

Departments:

• 1987-1999: Artificial Intelligence Center: widely regarded as a world class research group in AI
• 1986-1987: Cambridge (England) Computer Science Research Centre: Co-founder of SRI's first non-US research facility
• 1983-1986: Telecommunications Sciences Laboratory

Projects (for additional details, see http://dougmoran.com/dmoran)

• Three of these projects are listed in SRI's Timeline of Innovations: Inventing the future for more than 55 years (www.sri.com/about/timeline/): OAA and SLS (as part of "Speech Recognition" area) in the 1990's (2 of 33 listings), and CCWS (for "Multimedia Electronic Mail System") in the 1980's (1 of 16 listings).
• 1996-1999: Diagnosis, Explanation and Recovery from Break-Ins (DERBI): A host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) that assumed an out-of-the-box configuration (no special tools or settings). In DARPA IDS Evaluations (1998 and 1999), it used only end-of-day dumps as its data, but its performance was comparable to HIDS that used full real-time auditing data (Sun's BSM).
  • I created the project and obtained funding (DARPA), and then was system architect, lead programmer and project leader. Team of 3-6.
• 1994-1998: Open Agent Architecture™ (OAA). A distributed multi-agent system that focused on rapid assembly of new systems from existing applications. Included a multimodal user interface (speech, natural language, gesture and WIMPS). It was inspired by the experiences of the ShopTalk project (below).
  • Co-founder, subsequently Project Leader/Supervisor for suite of related projects. Team of 3-7 SRI staff, plus 1-4 visitors from sponsors (primarily Japanese and Korean).
  • Focused on management, marketing, sales, and customer relations, winning contracts from a range of clients (government and commercial, US and international).
  • Formulated technical requirements and approaches, but being the only senior staff member, I had to forgo participating in the implementation.
  • Honed the marketing message (presentation and demonstration) and technology to the extent that the OAA became one of SRI's "Top 10" technologies. My ability to quickly customize the presentation to a particular client or audience resulted in it being heavily used to promote SRI in general, including a presentation to a head-of-state.
  • The success of the OAA design and implementation was testified to by its incorporation into a range of other SRI systems.
  • Patent 6,859,931
• 1985-1992: ShopTalk: An evolving series of research prototypes that demonstrated the effectiveness of multimodal user interfaces. The user interface provide transparent, integrated access to multiple applications, for example, processing a query could involve combining historical data from a database with projected results from a simulator. This project arose from the merger of two related activities: a colleague's established marketing activity and my robust implementation of a prototype containing many of those ideas (as part of the CCWS project (below)).
  • Deputy project leader, focusing on internal activities: lead programmer and researcher. Team of 4-8.
  • Substantial contribution to marketing activities: Created and customized presentations and demonstrations, presenting part or all to many audiences.
• 1987-1994: Spoken Language Systems: Researcher and developer focusing on the integration of speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies.
• 1986-1987: Core Language Engine (CLE): A highly capable natural language processing system that integrated promising new technologies and approaches while applying the lessons learned from earlier large-scale systems. Researcher and developer, contributing to the development of the overall system, with primary responsibility for the pragmatics component (quantifier scoping).
• 1983-1986: Command & Control Workstation (CCWS): Design and implement multimedia mail and multimodal conferencing applications. System was installed on an aircraft carrier (USS Carl Vinson) and used during an operational deployment.
  • Project leader (replacing original) for a team of 6-7.
  • Designer and implementer of automated agent in the conferencing system that added graphical information to the conference workspace using spoken language access to databases.
  • Developed a commercial quality GUI toolkit. A software vendor (Quintus Computer Systems, acquired by Avaya 4/2001) explored licensing it for sale, and although it was judged to be technically superior (functionality, maturity, stability), they chose to license one of the alternatives for unspecified "business reasons."
• Computer Facility (1983-1994) (part-time): This activity provided the practical experience that led to the DERBI project and the TipOff product (above).
  • Developed extensive collection of tools to simplify the administration of a rapidly growing computer facility. The initial set of processes and tools was designed for my project's Sun workstations, but they were so successful that other projects arranged to have their computer become part of my cluster, resulting in my becoming manager for all the department's Suns. The Sun cluster scaled from an initial 4 workstations to 60 without an increase in support staff.

1980 - 1983: Oregon State University, Assistant Professor in Dept. of Computer Science.

Areas of Technical Expertise

Computer Security, Multi-agent Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing

Primary programming languages: C, Prolog

Primary scripting languages: PERL and various UNIX languages (shells, awk, sed, ...)

Operating Systems:

• UNIX, Linux & variants: System programmer (non-kernel), system administrator, expert user
• Microsoft Windows: advanced user (W95, W98, NT, W2000 Professional)

Selected Publications

D. B. Moran, "Effective Deployment of Honeypots against Internal and External Threats," Information Security Bulletin, October 2000.

D. B. Moran, "Trapping and Tracking Hackers: Collective security for survival in the Internet Age," Proceeding of the Third Information Survivability Workshop, Boston, Massachusetts, October 24-26, 2000.

W. M. Tyson, "DERBI: Diagnosis, Explanation and Recovery from Computer Break-ins", Final Report, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, January 12, 2001. DARPA Project F30602-96-C-0295. http://dbmoran.users.sonic.net/dougmoran-com/dmoran/PAPERS/DerbiFinal.pdf

U. Lindqvist, D. B. Moran, P. A. Porras, W. M. Tyson, "Designing IDLE: The Intrusion Data Library Enterprise," NORDSEC'98 (Third Nordic Workshop on Secure IT Systems), November 5-6, 1998, Trondheim, Norway. PostScript and PDF.
Short version presented at First International Workshop on the Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID), September 14-16, 1998, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

D. L. Martin, A. J. Cheyer, and D. B. Moran, "The Open Agent Architecture: A framework for building distributed software systems," Applied Artificial Intelligence, vol. 13, pp. 91-128, January-March 1999.

D. L. Martin, A. J. Cheyer, and D. B. Moran, "Building distributed software systems with the Open Agent Architecture," in Proc. of the Third International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, (Blackpool, Lancashire, UK), The Practical Application Company Ltd., March 1998.

D. B. Moran, A. J. Cheyer, L. E. Julia, D. L. Martin, and S. Park, "Multimodal user interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture," in Proc. of the 1997 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI97), (Orlando, Florida), pp. 61-68, 6-9 January 1997. Copyright 1997 ACM (see http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/).

D. B. Moran and A. J. Cheyer, "Intelligent agent-based user interfaces," in Proceedings of International Workshop on Human Interface Technology 95 (IWHIT'95), (Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan), pp. 7-10, The University of Aizu, 12-13 October 1995.

R. Moore, D. Appelt, J. Dowding, J. M. Gawron, and D. Moran, "Combining linguistic and statistical knowledge sources in natural-language processing for ATIS," in Proceedings ARPA Spoken Language Systems Technology Workshop, (Austin, Texas), 22-25 January 1995.

J. Dowding, R. Moore, F. Andry, and D. Moran, "Interleaving syntax and semantics in an efficient bottom-up parser," in Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico), pp. 110-116, June 1994.

P. R. Cohen, M. Dalrymple, D. B. Moran, F. C. N. Pereira, J. W. Sullivan, R. A. Gargan, J. L. Schlossberg, and S. W. Tyler, "Synergistic use of direct manipulation and natural language," in Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI'89 Conference Proceedings, (New York, New York), pp. 227-234, ACM, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., April 1989.

Full listing: http://dougmoran.com/dmoran/publications.html

Education

University of Massachusetts (Amherst), Fellow, A.P. Sloan Foundation grant for Interdisciplinary Studies in Cognitive Sciences in Dept. of Linguistics and Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences.

The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), M.S. and Ph.D. from the Dept. of Computer and Communication Sciences.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bachelor of Science from the Computer Science program in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering (Course VI-3) (currently EECS)

Professional Societies

American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
IEEE and IEEE Computer Society

Other Activities

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