Privacy-Preserving Data Services: Beyond GDPR

For years, data-driven tech companies have used customers as their raw material: Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others track our moves across the web in order to sell that information and target advertisements. For a long time, users found this an acceptable tradeoff- but in the wake of the 2016 election and amidst the changes brought about by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),  » Read More

New Paper: Cybersecurity in Distributed Optimization

Conventional centralized optimization algorithms have challenge solving big optimization problems- at some scale, you simply can’t fit the problem on a single computer, let alone manage all of the variables. To solve this, researchers use decentralized optimization techniques to break the problem into a set of subproblems which can be rapidly solved on distributed computers or smart devices- but this exposes the optimization algorithm to cybersecurity threats from hacking these consumer-level devices.  » Read More

Ethereum Core team

Devcon3 Debrief

I was honored to speak at Devcon3, the Ethereum Developers’ Conference, on my research on coordinating decentralized optimization with blockchains.
The attendees were a strange mix: 30-50% of the attendees were speculators who knew nothing about blockchains, but were frantically trying to understand the asset which had ballooned in their portfolio.  » Read More