Stephen Cobb
Welcome! This website is a central repository of links to my work as a public-interest technologist, researcher, teacher, and "ongoing experiment in trying to live right." My current interests are the risks and ethics of technology, particular artificial intelligence and cybercrime, together with gender equality, healthcare, socialcare, and public policy. These days my time is divided between researching, volunteering, and caring for my disabled partner and nonagenarian mum.
You can find out more about my work and career on LinkedIn and Wikipedia. If you want to connect with me on social media, I am on Blue Sky and Facebook, as well as LinkedIn. There is also an email contact form on my personal blog and the information security blog that I write with my partner, Chey Cobb, author of Network Security for Dummies and one of the first speakers at BlackHat who was not a bloke.
In 2019, I retired as Senior Security Researcher at ESET, the security software firm, and we relocated from San Diego, California, to Coventry, in England, just in time to support my mum when Covid-19 hit. The global pandemic gave an existential nudge to my research on technology risk and I began investigating "tech that could kill us all," including artifical intelligence (AI). (Fortunately, I had learned quite a bit about AI at ESET which was one of the first companies apply AI technologies to the wicked problem of defending information systems against malicious code.)
On the bright side, the modest semi-detached that we rent less than 400 yards from mum's flat has a lovely garden that Chey enjoys tending when her health permits. And I am enjoying driving patients to hospital as an NHS Volunteer and serving on the board of Carers Trust Heart of England. To relax I read classic apocalyptic fiction and curate my photos to share them.
WritingStephen Speaking
Links to recordings of me speaking at conferences and seminars, and in interviews.
For example, TEDx and DEFCON.
Speaking
More links, work, and websites
Items will be added here as I get round to them (visual pun intended.
Thanks to a family tree developed several generations ago, Stephen has always known where he came from, and where a lot of Cobbs around the world come from. He has shared a picture of this tree in the interests of genealogical research.
