(CS)²AI Author Spotlight™ on Matthew Luallen

Matthew Luallen is the author of What the Cursor Holds and founder and principal advisor of Sph3r3, LLC, where he helps organizations adopt AI securely — treating security as the foundation, not a feature — across cybersecurity strategy, AI governance, and cyber-physical systems.

That perspective was built over three decades defending critical infrastructure. Matthew co-founded three companies in control system cybersecurity: Encari, which guided North American power grid operators through NERC CIP; Dragos Security, where he helped create CyberLens for OT asset discovery; and CYBATI, the cyber-physical security training company later acquired by IntelliGenesis. Earlier, he served as an information security engineer and architect at Argonne National Laboratory. A longtime SANS Institute certified instructor and now Lead Research Scientist for Education Translation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Information Trust Institute, he has trained more than 9,000 professionals across government, utilities, and industry.

What the Cursor Holds turns that engineer's discipline inward. Built from 5,775 logged AI conversations spanning 2022 to 2026, it is a three-voice account — narrator, machine, and user — of the midnight conversations where people bring their work, their questions, and their most human moments to a machine that answers back.

In this Author Series conversation, Matthew explores the intersection where he has spent his career: people, AI, and cybersecurity for cyber-physical systems — and what keeping the human in the loop means when the loop is learning back.

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