Joe Bradley: A bit of a winding road. [Chief Scientist] [Career Notes]
00:00 You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. My name is Joe Bradley, and I'm the chief scientist at LivePerson. It's not so much that I didn't have an idea of things that I wanted to do. It's that there's been a lot of different ideas along the way. And it ranges from opera singing to potentially wanting to be a professor of English literature to being a classroom teacher to working in tech the first time to being a physicist
02:02 and all the way now to what my job is today. It's been a bit of a windy road. I found that having a range of career options and existing in a range of places at a professional level with a variety of people and a variety of perspectives has been very helpful. I think one of the areas people in my field can often fall down in is they can have this mindset where they're like, oh, well, we're the scientists in the room, you know, we're the engineers, and we kind of have this access to a truth that you don't. What happens then in companies, when that mindset builds up, you get these ivory tower organizations and you get people that don't really know how to listen and understand
02:49 the other professionals in the room. I've always had a love for a couple of things. One of them has been mathematics. That's kind of always been there. I fought it for a while when I was younger because I came of age in the mid-90s when it was really cool to be an artist and really not cool to be as nerdy as it is today. Throughout my career, I've wanted to kind of marry those things. I think there is a real connection between music and math. The sort of like absent-minded scientist or the mad scientist of math than it is typically the
03:25 engineer mindset. I think there's something cognitive going on there. Many of the most mathematically intuitive people that I've met are people that also have a creative outlet, and a lot of times it's music. I was fortunate enough to be able to get a master's degree in mathematics and also pretty close to the equivalent in physics. So I went up to UW from there, spent several years getting a PhD. And then I went and worked in the country's national labs a little bit. I worked for Los Alamos as a grad student. I worked for Livermore as a scientist. That was a very interesting time and I think very fun and fertile academic time. But ultimately, for me, that felt like it was the career trajectory there felt like there was this kind of weird physicist with some strange other stuff in the background. But there was one recruiter in Amazon that took a chance and saw something in what I'd written.
04:22 And I spent time there working for the ads platform, working as a scientist, building models, building systems that build models, and then started to kind of take on management work in other places from there. I kind of have two jobs. The first one is to kind of lead the science as a function for a live person and to grow the scientific professionals we have. Deciding with the science leads what our research agenda should be. Making sure we have the right tooling and data management, all that stuff is one piece of it, but also making sure that we have a good habit of mind around the way
05:09 we run experiments and the way we learn. So that's like one side of the job. On the other hand, I also run a product development organization, which is sort of coupled into the science teams, and we manage them with a little bit of a cross-functional pods. Sometimes I think of scientists as a little bit of a cross between like a designer and an engineer. There's a little bit of both mentalities in there. I think you also have to manage the art of helping them with process and with management. I've come into a number of science teams that were kind of essentially unmanaged,
05:45 where there really wasn't a process about how you move work forward or how you understand if it's moving forward well and how you stop it when it isn't. And the first instinct of a lot of science folks is to put some structure around this and to hear that as creatively limiting. You have to make the case to these folks
06:00 that it's actually going to help them in the end. One of the smartest things I did was go to grad school and really go deep on math. And there was a time I was doing that. It was like 8 to 12 hours a day of math, math, math, go home, I would do more. But in hindsight, now how I look at it is that I invested in training my mind, be able to do things easily that it could not do before. And that without that training, most people can't do. I think however you succeed in this world, you're probably succeeding because you've done some version of that. Maybe it's not math. Maybe it's acting.
06:46 Maybe it's whatever. You've gone deep on something and you've become something different because of how much you put into it. You know, if we advance the ball, and I don't mean we as LivePerson, I mean we as a culture, but if LivePerson advances the ball a little bit on that general goal, I think we've done some good and I'd be very proud of that. Hey, everybody. Dave here. Have you ever wondered where your personal information is lurking online?
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