Larry Bunch
Senior Research Associate
Larry was one of the first graduate research assistants at IHMC, having received his computer science degree from the University of West Florida. He worked several years in industry as a software developer and ultimately technology director before returning to IHMC in 2002.
While in industry, Larry led an Advanced Technology Group responsible for developing core technologies for custom and commercial products. Larry also consulted with several well-known corporations. He developed sales force automation and financial reporting applications for Philip Morris, USA. He led the development of MediaOne Cable’s Enterprise Electronic Payment System responsible for handling payments made through all of MediaOne’s customer call centers. He also consulted with SunTrust Mortgage on key data warehousing and reporting applications.
Since his return to IHMC, Larry’s research interests have focused on cybersecurity, data visualization, policy regulation, and knowledge representation and reasoning. His visualization and cybersecurity contributions include a three-dimensional visualization for large-scale event data such as network communications (U.S. patent #8,803,804) and an interactive display to enable network operators to understand and control the behavior of distributed network defenses. He also helped develop command and control systems for moving target network defenses and systems to help network analysts make sense of cyberevents through visualizations and human-agent teamwork. Larry also helped develop theories of cyber deception, as well as cyber red team and counterattack capabilities.
In the area of policy regulation and multi-agent systems, Larry has contributed to the KAoS policy services including advanced policy analysis, policy precedence reasoning, and conflict resolution. He is an inventor of the Luna agent framework (patent in process) and has applied semantic policy reasoning to govern information sharing in US DoD tactical environments.
His research in knowledge representation and reasoning includes advanced tools for comparison and analysis of concept maps, a semantic dialect for describing Quality-of-Service tradeoffs in U.S. Air Force information management systems, and reasoning techniques based on free-text search for dynamic information relation discovery.
Larry enjoys ballroom and swing dancing; he and his wife won the 2019 UCWDC Division III World Championship covering eight dance styles. He is also a bit of a pool shark, enjoys playing soccer, sailing, and biking.