Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Senior Research Scientist

heliax

February 2022 – Present Remote
I am product lead on Typhon, a next-generation heterogeneous consensus protocol.
 
 
 
 
 

Postdoctoral Researcher

The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

September 2019 – February 2022 Saarbrücken, Germany

I am working with Peter Druschel on the future of distributed systems.

I worked with Peter Druschel, Deepak Garg, Roberta De Viti, and many others on the ProLoc and CoVault projects, which seek to answer 4 questions:

  1. If we somehow had access to all GPS data and bluetooth encounters of modern smartphones, what useful applications could we create, beyond contact tracing?
  2. How do we prevent malicious devices from defrauding those applications?
  3. Precisely what queries / data accesses do we need to allow these applications and fraud protections?
  4. How do we implement these queries without a privacy nightmare?
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Oracle Labs East

June 2016 – August 2017 Burlington, Massachusetts, USA
I worked with Mark Moir, Harold Carr, Maurice Herlihy, and others on experimental sharded blockchains using Haskell and the Tangaroa byzantine consensus algorithm.
 
 
 
 
 

Ph.D. Candidate

Cornell University

August 2012 – August 2019 Ithaca, New York, USA
While most of my time as a Ph.D. Student was devoted to research, I have also participated in teaching both undergraduate and masters students.
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineering Intern

Google

June 2012 – August 2012 Los Angeles, California, USA
I worked with Eric Wood, and the Active View team to keep Google-supported ads off policy-violating sites,gaining experience with MapReduce, Internet-Scale Datasets, C++, and large codebases.
 
 
 
 
 

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow

The California Institute of Technology

June 2009 – August 2011 Pasadena, California, USA
I was awarded a $6,000 research fellowship three years running, and conducted research at Caltech and JPL in Astrophysics and Computer Science.

Featured Publications

OPODIS

The first consensus algorithm with heterogeneous failures, heterogeneous acceptors, and heterogeneous learners.
PDF Code Project Slides Video Technical Report
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

When not all data has the same security properties, distributed ACID transaction scheduling has surprising security consequences.
PDF Slides Video DOI Technical Report

Publications

OPODIS

The first consensus algorithm with heterogeneous failures, heterogeneous acceptors, and heterogeneous learners.
PDF Code Project Slides Video Technical Report
In Submission

We present Charlotte, a framework for composable, Authenticated Distributed Data Structures (ADDSs), like blockchains, git, bittorrent, etc.
Technical Report
Technical Report

This report represents an earlier prototype implementation of the Charlotte framework.
Technical Report
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

When not all data has the same security properties, distributed ACID transaction scheduling has surprising security consequences.
PDF Slides Video DOI Technical Report
Technical Report

We use the Decentralized Label Model to show how distributed algorithms, like Bosco and Nysiad, can be generalized from more complex trust environments.
Project Technical Report
Technical Report

With novel, carefully tuned features, neural nets, and SVMs, we were able to determine the author of samples from a group of ten webcomic artists with 94% accuracy.
Technical Report
Technical Report

We investigate some potential “slowdown” cases of the classic multi-Paxos algorithm, and developed some new variants to avoid them.
Technical Report
SURF Report

Since a message decrypted with the “wrong” key is pseudorandom, we build pseudorandom trees using onion routing with multiple forwarding addresses.
Technical Report
SURF Report

Contributions to NuSIM, a simulator for the NuSTAR space telescope, concerning how to compensate for thermal fluctuations in NuSTAR’s mast.
Technical Report
SURF Report

OpenGIS uses the EPSG registry to convert coordinate systems used by maps of Earth. Making something similar for the moon proved deceptively difficult.
Technical Report

Talks

The first consensus algorithm with heterogeneous failures, heterogeneous acceptors, and heterogeneous learners.
11 December 2020 12:00 OPODIS online
PDF Code Project Slides Video

With Charlotte, we can append one block onto multiple blockchains, solving the atomic commit problem.
PDF Project Slides Video

A work in progress talk about Scalability, Confidentiality, Availability, and Integrity for Block-Webs with the Charlotte Framework.
PDF Slides

A work-in-progress talk about our Heterogeneous Consensus algorithm.
PDF Project Slides

When not all data has the same security properties, distributed ACID transaction scheduling has surprising security consequences.
25 October 2016 12:00 CCS Hofburg Palace, Vienna
PDF Slides Video

We present a successfully implemented attack on traditional atomic commit methods across trust domains.
15 October 2016 14:30 Cornell PL Retreat Greek Peak
PDF Slides

An earlier, work-in-progress version of our CCS Talk.
PDF Slides

We’ve been looking at modeling distributed system failures with information flow tools, and expressing heterogeneous trust.
PDF Project Slides

Contact

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