Niels Waller

Niels Waller is a Professor of Quantitative Psychology at Vanderbilt University. His main research areas cover Item Response Theory (IRT) and Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) to psychometric tests. Waller was Xamplify's psychometrics advisor. No wait a minute, he was part of Xamplify's management team. Whatever he was, he was not be be found.

Niels Waller and Xamplify

Niels Waller is world's leading psychometrics expert and Jeffrey Klein, CEO of Xamplify used his name to maximum advantage. Besides listing Niels Waller's name prominently on its website, Xamplify Inc used his name while posting job recruitment ads. Last time our star from Vanderbilt University was listed on Xamplify's website was just before my deadline to removed their names would have expired around early May, 2002. Just 3-4 weeks later Xamplify came up with its claim that it could detect money laundering activities.

Privately too, Xamplify seems to have been claiming to perhaps the potential investors and clients that Niles Waller was part of the management team and here is a graphic file created before I joined Xamplify.

Niels Waller and Psychometric testing

More on Psychometrics page but briefly, Xamplify Inc claimed that its IRT-bsed surveys

...were developed in house by the world's leading psychometricians (and IRT experts), Dr. Niels Waller of Vanderbilt University, and Dr. Steven Reise of UCLA.

In house above means Niels Waller and Steven Reise developed these in (their) house(s). Makes perfect sense to me.

Moreover, Xamplify went on to claim that

Also, the questions are designed through a semantic ontology that determines several layers of information besides the explicitly asked information in the "lingo" and relevant metrics of our client's domain.

A survey designed by Xamplify reveals that if you want to know the tech-savviness of a person (actually we had tech-savviness as one of the major psychometrics we measured) just ask how savvy they are. "I would rate me tech savvy as - low, average, good, high, I'm a pro."

Niels Waller and Steven Reise

Steven Reise and Niels Waller have worked together in past and they were working (or more accurately perhaps, not working) together for Xamplify.