Mark Kriegsman

Early Life and Education

Born in 1966, Kriegsman showed an early aptitude for computing that attracted local press attention in 1979, when he was 13 years old. Lucy Meyer of the New Jersey Summit Herald noted his habit of inventing programs that would "just pop into my head." By age 15 he had channeled that interest into game development, releasing his first game, StarBlaster, followed by a second title, Panic Button. His earliest published technical work appeared in Apple Assembly Line in June 1981, with a piece titled "Two Fancy Tone Generators."

Kriegsman went on to study cognitive science at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, an academic focus that would shape his subsequent career in AI and software development.

Career

After graduating from Hampshire College, Kriegsman joined Cognitive Systems, Inc., a firm founded by noted AI researcher Roger Schank. There he worked on large-scale rule-based, statistical, and text-processing AI systems. He later synthesized those three approaches in a paper co-authored with Ralph Barletta and published in IEEE Expert in 1993, titled "Building a Case-Based Help Desk Application."

Work designing document management systems at Interleaf led Kriegsman to found his first startup, Document.com, which was later acquired by Merrill. He subsequently founded Clearway Technologies, where he served as a senior figure before the company was acquired by Mirror Image Internet. Clearway developed the FireSite web accelerator and content delivery network, as well as the early internet search tool WebArcher. In late 1998, Clearway became the subject of an early ad-blocking controversy when it released AdScreen, a web-based ad-blocking tool. The release provoked significant backlash from users and sparked broader discussion about the role of advertising in web publishing; Clearway withdrew AdScreen just two days after its release in response to user feedback.

Following his time at Clearway, Kriegsman worked as a senior developer at @stake, a security consultancy that was later acquired by Symantec.

Notable Work

Kriegsman is one of the co-founders of Veracode, a software security company, and served as its Director of Engineering. The role reflected a long-standing interest in software security that runs throughout his career. He has also been a vocal advocate for secure information sharing and the open-access movement, and has publicly criticized what he characterizes as questionable business practices in the technology industry.

He has been writing and contributing to open-source software for approximately 30 years, spanning areas including web acceleration, content delivery, and security tooling.

Patents

Kriegsman holds five US patents. Four relate to content delivery networks and systems, issued between 1999 and 2005 (US Patents 5,991,809; 6,370,580; 6,480,893; and 6,915,329). A fifth patent, US Patent 7,890,571 issued in 2011, concerns dynamic web page assembly and caching.

Personal

Kriegsman is a descendant of William Bradford, the leader of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and of early Santa Fe merchants Willi and Flora Spiegelberg. Willi Spiegelberg served as Mayor of Santa Fe from 1884 to 1886. Kriegsman lives in Massachusetts with his child Ness.