Allan M. Schiffman instituted and oversees CommerceNet's investment activities and fellows program. He's advisor to and a board-member for several of CommerceNet's portfolio companies. Most recently, he co-founded and serves as CTO of Usable Security Systems, a new startup making the Internet safe and easy.

Mr. Schiffman's engineering career spans system modeling, processor architecture, programming languages, software development tools, internet applications, and communications security. His current interests include secure distributed systems, user-centric authentication, privacy, and electronic commerce. Mr. Schiffman is sometimes called to be an expert witness and consultant in IP litigation cases, usually in conjunction with colleagues at Precedia Associates.

Prior to CommerceNet, Mr. Schiffman was founder and chief technology officer of Terisa Systems, a pioneer in Web security. Earlier, Mr. Schiffman was chief technology officer at Enterprise Integration Technologies, a leader in the development of Internet electronic commerce and the creator of CommerceNet. He played a significant role in creating many innovative systems that paved the way for electronic commerce, including Mastercard/Visa's payment card protocol (SET), the first Web security protocol (S-HTTP), and the first secure Web browser (Secure Mosaic, deployed by CommerceNet in 1994).

Earlier in his career, Mr. Schiffman led the development of a family of high-performance Smalltalk implementations that gained both academic recognition and commercial success. These systems included several innovations now widely adopted, such as the "just-in-time compilation" technique universally used by Java virtual machines.

Mr. Schiffman holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.