Crooks Analytics

Consulting sole proprietorship of Ted Crooks.

30+ years applying machine learning to financial security and credit.

Founding product manager, Falcon credit-card fraud protection system (today, a FICO product) now protecting over 3 billion payment cards. The first commercially successful neural-network machine-learning system.

Inventor and development lead of multiple other products and services, mostly based on neural-network machine learning.

Formerly Vice President, Global Fraud Solutions, FICO.

Long-term consultant to industry leaders such as MasterCard, IBM, NICE Actimize.

Today, largely retired, doing selected consulting and board work.

Patents

Comprehensive Identity Protection System (US-8296250)

Inventor: Theodore J. Crooks, Uwe F. Mayer, Michael Lazarus

A neural-network based detection system to identify applications and/or accounts at risk of identity fraud, and a disposition subsystem to process data provided by the detection system and to determine whether identity fraud exists in the applications and/or accounts….

Comprehensive Online Fraud Detection System and Method (US-8683586, US-8781956)

Inventor Theodore J. Crooks

A neural-network, machine-learning, fraud detection and protection server to monitor online commercial transactions between a webserver and a client computer, and generate a risk assessment of a user associated with the client computer. …

Fraud Clearinghouse (US-7756783)

Inventor Theodore J. Crooks

A system for sharing reports of fraud between financial institutions and identifying the riskiness of related individuals and accounts.

Systems and Methods for Making Structured Reference Credit Decisions (US-8781956)

Inventor Theodore J. Crooks

A system to facilitate expanding the availability of credit to consumers in developing countries using a system of identity-protected, risk-assessed personal references to accelerate the availability of reliable credit ratings.

Systems and Methods for Management of Credit Groups (US-20120109723)

A management system for managing credit transactions for groups of lenders, borrowers, and/or referencers to expand credit availability to the credit underserved.

Systems And Methods for Shared Lending Risk (US-20130110655)

Inventor Louis Steven Biafore, Theodore James Crooks, Christoper Deboer, Krishna Gopinathan

A system for risk management in transactions where a merchant participates in customer financing.

Application-Specific Method and Apparatus for Assessing Similarity Between Two Data Objects (US-6917952)

Inventors Matthew N. Dailey, Anu K. Pathria, Mark A. Laffoon, Theodore J. Crooks

A machine-learning-based system to assess the similarity of a job applicant’s experience to the requirements and ideal experiences for a job. (Used to vet the initial hires of the Transportation Security Agency.)

Apparatus for Renting Articles (US-500751)

Inventors Theodore J. Crooks, Terry L. Zentz, Matthew G. Morris

A robotic vending system for videos.

Other Notable Inventions and Projects

Talent Guardian — (With Krishna Gopinathan and members of Aon Hewitt) System to identify and retain critical talent in large organizations. First HR product with shown, statistical relationship to increased shareholder value.

MasterCard Account Data Compromise Threat Score — System applying a neural-network model to assess over 100 million card accounts exposed to data breaches for the likelihood they would be compromised. Applies advanced, many-processor architecture.

Aperture — Co-designer of the natural-language-processing system, automating résumé assessment (used in the initial hiring of 47,000 TSA employees).

Risk Finder — Designer and product leader of this fraud-management system, in continuous service for MasterCard members for over 20 years.

ProfitMax for Telecommunications — Designer and product leader for system detecting fraudulent telephone charges handling nation-level volumes.

Silent Partner — a system for efficient and fair reference sharing among real-estate brokers.

In Vivo — System for monitoring elementary and secondary student performance and assessing the effectiveness of many aspects of their education, combined with projecting expected future academic performance to produce an individualized educational plan for each student.

Books

Author of three internationally distributed books on software, including Using Oracle published by Macmillan/Que.

Public Relations

Successful spokesperson appearing in The Wall Street Journal (three times), Barron’s, The New York Times (twice), The Los Angeles Times, PBS Newshour, CBS Evening News, NPR’s Marketplace (three times), and an entire episode of the Suze Orman Show.

Taught hundreds of executives how neural networks are built and how they work.

Civic Activity

Served ten years as board member and board president of a public elementary school district and a large, public high school district.

Served as San Diego County Workforce Partnership chair.