I am an assistant professor of computer science at Yale University and co-founder of Espresso Systems.
Previously, I was a PhD candidate at Stanford University, working with Dan Boneh in the applied cryptography research group.
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The major theme of my research is privacy and verifiability in information systems, with a special attention on decentralized systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. These systems have revolutionized trust, transparency, and privacy for applications in finance and beyond.
Verifiability topics I haved worked on include:
verifiable computation - how to efficiently verify that an untrusted service delivers the correct result of a computation, as well as verifiable private delegation, where the inputs to the computation must be kept secret from the service
verifiable storage - how to verify an untrusted remote server is storing data properly
verifiable fairness - designing lotteries where unbiased selection of a winner is publicly verifiable
My recent work has largely focussed on the intersection of privacy and verifiability, leveraging cryptographic tools such as succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), private information retrieval, and homomorphic encryption, while also coming up with new designs that improve their efficiency. These tools have far-reaching applications, particularly within the realm of digital finance, where privacy is strongly needed but lack of transparency facilitates mismanagement and fraud, or in the realm of healthcare where there is an increasing need to perform large scale analysis on private patient data.
My research draws from techniques in multiple areas of computer science, including cryptography, distributed systems, hardware architecture, and economics. My research has also spanned topics including secure computation, private database search, economics of blockchains, and applications of hardware trusted execution environments.
Technology transfer is very important to me. My research on Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) sparked a multimillion dollar industry initiative (see VDF Alliance) and will play an important role in several blockchains including Ethereum 2.0, Chia, and Filecoin. My research on Proofs of Replication is the basis of Filecoin's incentive layer and consensus protocol. Filecoin is a live distributed storage system that already has reached a storage capacity exceeding 1.5 exabytes. Our new SNARK system Basefold is used by several commercial products under development.
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