ICS - About Me

About Jim...

Bottom Line Up Front... As an independent consultant with over forty years filling roles for ideation, design, business case and proposals, presales, delivery, and management; I am now looking to provide consulting services to lead or contribute to projects of personal interest. My passion is to apply technology that improves the human condition and stay current with evolving capabilities.

About Me... I have diverse computer science experience, uniquely paired with a background in clinical psychology. I have always had an interest in the convergence of the two fields. I am looking for consulting opportunities where I can contribute to client success and also complement my personal projects. I was working on my master's degree in clinical Psychology while providing services to severely schizophrenic clientele when computers started to be assessable to everyone. I took a couple of computer classes that were, back then, offered by the math department. The professors were exceptional; having the curiosity, insight, and passion to explore where this computer thing was going. One brought a personal computer to class excitedly exclaiming Soon you’ll no longer have to stand in line with a deck of Hollerith cards to use a computer! That personal computer was a breadboard with a hexadecimal display. My personal conflict became, should I follow the gray human world of psychology and mental health or the black and white mathematical world of computers? The two worlds seemed to have little in common!

Since then, I have enjoyed watching – often with frustration, sometimes with elation, and frequently with amusement - the worlds of computers and humanities converging. The tech industry eventually acknowledged the need for common sense and principles to navigate an uncertain and changing world of human-driven requirements. Advances in AI are modeled on how a human beings process information. it is impossible to overstate the impact connected-computers has and will continue to have on our social fabric. I have thrived and even contributed to forty years of tech transitions, in part due to my early career in mental health.

Professional Passions... I want to combine cutting edge technologies and social research to enhance geriatric care, mental health, and outcomes for those with certain genetic conditions. Semantic data representations bridges the real world of people and the abstract world of computers, so I look for all oppotunities to advance my understanding of ontologies, graph technologies, natural language understanding, and generative AI. At this stage of my career, I have the luxury of selecting projects about which I am truly passionate, such as projects that...

Apply technology in unique ways to better the human condition, especially in areas of mental health, suicide, addiction, or related physiological or neurological conditions,
Employ Artificial Intelligence, as it enables more human-like interaction, how and what it learns and emerging parallels to human experience like bias and proper prompt engineering; now humans and computers both hallucinate!
Advance methods for creation and delivery of products, proposals, business cases, or professional services that facilitate team success through individual participation and growth,
Are based on the latest paradigm shifts in technologies that I believe include ontologies, semantic thinking and graph; natural language, large learning models (LLMs), generative AI, and ever more sophisticated automation of the delivery lifecycle
Provides an opportunity for me to see customer needs and diverse application of technologies by reviewing RFPs and proposal responses for a range of technology and business domains, while impartially contributing ideas and solutions.

Experience and Skills...

I have forty plus-years experience meeting customer needs through solution architecting, full lifecycle product and solution development, commercial and government business and proposal development, professional services, internal mentoring and customer training, and adopting leading edge technologies and major industry paradigm shifts.

Domain	Experience	Skills
Product Development	Proposed, Managed, Developed, and Patented Products focusing on Tools and platforms for a variety of product domains, extended lifecycle of existing product lines though tech insertion. I developed solutions as products for sale, commercial solutions for legal and telco industry, and a range of government agencies (Intel, DoD, Civilian such as USPTO, IRS, Treasury)	Program Management, Concept to delivery, OJT to reach award of numerous patents, self-study to apply or contribute to standards and emerging technologies
Business Development	Business Strategy (C-Level), Proposals, Reviews, Requirements Analysis (from RFPs, capture, pre-sales, market signals), customer-facing pre-sales support, trusted advisor roles	Technical and Management proposals, FAR compliance, pricing, staffing, Project startup, Walking the halls as influencer
Solution Architecture, Modernization and Prototypes	Evolution of linear, Object Oriented, Service Oriented (SOA), Containers, Messaging/Streaming with emerging data and UX/UI, standard architectures e.g. Well Architected Framework (WAF) DODAF, Ontologies, Graph and Semantic driven design, with reverse engineering and "as is" analysis to support modernization strategies	AWS Developer and Architect certifications,. Certifications in practices and programming environments from UX/UI to data analytics, PC standards to interact seamlessly with Mainframe
Governance, Development Lifecycle, Transitions	Product Lifecycle, Service Expertise in delivering the value of Agile; not just another set of processes. My expertise is understanding what the customer needs and translating those needs into processes and solutions. I enjoy teaching and mentoring especially to support adoptions of industry transitions and technologies	AWS Train the Trainer Certification, Certifications in ITIL/ITSM, Agile, Scaled Agile (SAFe), DevOps, and many point techniques or processes
Information and Data Centric Development	Data-driven solutions based on semantic consistency enabled by Ontologies and Graph to reduce friction in integration and data governance across ownership boundaries. Enables analytics, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), rich applications that require access to data, information, and processed intelligence	AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty (from LinuxAcademy), hands-on work with data hubs and complex ingestion strategies, hands-on with Neo4J Graph, ELK (Elastic, Logstash, Kibana) and streaming (Kafka)