(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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