Jim Beno
Jim is a user experience leader with 25+ years of experience researching user behavior, innovating product ideas, and designing human-machine interfaces. He has an M.S. in Human Factors & Ergonomics. This is complemented with a solid foundation in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science from U.C. Berkeley and Stanford. Jim is a “hands-on” innovator, be it creating product prototypes or remodeling his house. He is an Extra class licensed amateur radio operator with CISA AuxComm training, and is a board member and RACES lead for the Oakland Radio Communication Association. Photography has always been his passion, especially wildlife and astrophotography. He lives in the Oakland hills, and studied Aikido as an "uchi deshi" (live-in student) in Japan.
Artificial Intelligence
Jim led the design of human-AI interaction at Skyhigh Security and AppOmni. He has a Professional Certificate in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence from U.C. Berkeley College of Engineering / Haas School of Business, and an Artificial Intelligence Professional Certificate from Stanford Engineering CGOE. While working on this coursework, he created Datawaza, an open source Python library for data exploration, visualization, and model evaluation. He has a passion for Natural Language Processing (NLP), and published research on collaborative approaches to sentiment analysis: ELECTRA and GPT-4o: Cost-Effective Partners for Sentiment Analysis (see jbeno/sentiment for fine-tuned models, dataset, and source code). More Python projects can be found in his GitHub portfolio.
Cybersecurity
Jim has over 10 years of experience in Cloud / SaaS security, and is very familiar with the target personas, needs, and Jobs to be Done (JTBD). Most recently, he was Senior Director of Product Design at AppOmni, a SaaS security provider, where he also assisted the AI team as a Data Scientist. Prior to that, Jim was Director of User Experience at Skyhigh Security, a leading SSE provider focused on Data-Aware Cloud Security. This was the culmination of a journey that began by joining a small startup called Skyhigh Networks, which was acquired by McAfee in 2018, and eventually sold to Symphony Technology Group.
Communication & Collaboration
Before his cybersecurity work, Jim worked at Cisco in a variety of roles. He managed a global design team focused on the deployment and management of Cisco's communication and collaboration products (voice and video). He was also the UX lead for Cisco Quad (later re-branded as WebEx Social), where he co-invented a number of patents related to social collaboration. He also worked as a Human Factors Engineer for Cisco's next-generation phone and touch devices, during which time he conducted research on TelePresence lighting.
Early Start-Ups
Prior to Cisco, Jim drove the user experience for two successful start-ups: Opsware (formerly Loudcloud, acquired by Hewlett-Packard) and Oblix (acquired by Oracle). Loudcloud was an Andreessen-Horowitz company, ahead of its time in with perhaps the earliest cloud computing offerings. Oblix started as a suite of Intranet applications, and evolved to Identity management.
Human Factors
Jim has an M.S. in Human Factors & Ergonomics from the Industrial & Systems Engineering department at San Jose State University, and has taken Cognitive Psychology and Statistics courses from U.C. Santa Cruz. This provided a solid academic foundation in cognition/perception/attention/memory, ergonomics, motor learning, and experimental design – plus Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies to solve business problems. He has led a number of committees and received awards from the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (HFES).
Journalism & Writing
Earlier in his career, Jim studied photojournalism at Temple University in Philadelphia, and graduated with a B.A. in 1995. He worked for a local Gannett newspaper called The Reporter, but then moved to California in 1996 to join a startup during the Internet boom. With his background in journalism, Jim wrote a technical book for New Riders, and has published design case studies and research.