I’m a technologist, engineer, and game designer in Washington DC.
Hi there! I’m a former technical-lead and manager for large-scale technical projects trying to bring more perspectives into decision making around technology and thinking about the future. I’ve also authored multiple award-winning games that explore new unorthodox perspectives in storytelling.
I received my PhD in Cryptography from UCLA in 2012 as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Hungary. I’m always interested in projects exploring technical and speculative thinking in new perspectives. Feel free to get in get in touch. My pronouns are (he/him).
Currently I’m the Senior Technologist for Enforcement at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Prior Experience.
Technologist at the U.S. Senate with Senator Ben Ray Luján
I spent two years at the Senate working on federal policy on technology, telecommunication, consumer protection, financial services, housing, intelligence, and animal welfare.
Technical Lead & Manager at Google
Before leaving to do technology policy in the Senate I was a technical lead and manager on multiple projects in global-scale projects at Google. I was a part of the Video Inventory Analytics team at YouTube that used Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to classify millions of videos daily, and the Android Framework & Google Play teams that deploy tools for Mobile Development across the world.
Founder & Lead Designer at Thorny Games
I founded Thorny Games with Kathryn Hymes and has worked as primary designer & writer on all of our projects. I lead a collaboration of over a dozen contributors for Dialect: A Game about Language & How it Dies which has shipped over 10,000 copies and won multiple Game of the Year awards. I also lead the charitable efforts for the studio in collaboration with the Nicaraguan Sign Languages Projects (here’s an account from a trip in 2018). I also was a founding member of Aphasia Games for Health, a joint venture with the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
PhD in Cryptography
I finished my PhD in Mathematics (with a focus in Cryptography) under Rafail Ostrovksy and Amit Sahai at UCLA with many impactful conference and journal publications. My thesis was titled “Reducing Trust when Trust is Essential” which examined different vectors for reducing the amount or types of trust required in systems that require a trusted authority (e.g. central key-generation).
Academic Publications.
Dynamic Credentials & Ciphertext Delegation for Attribute-Based Encryption
One of the first works that consider the problem of persistently changing attribute structures in cloud storage systems. Cited over 200 times since publication. CRYPTO 2012.
On Tweaking Luby-Rackoff Blockciphers
Tweakable blockciphers, first formalized by Liskov, Rivest, and Wagner, are blockciphers with an additional input, the tweak, which allows for variability. This paper studies how tweakable blockciphers can be created through modifying generic Luby-Rackoff constructions. ASIACRYPT 2007.
Identifying Cheaters without an Honest Majority
A novel reconsideration of identifiable secret sharing into cases where identifiability only matters to honest parties involved in the protocol. Shows that with this relaxation, most information theoretic limitations on secret sharing can be relaxed. TCC 2012.
On Common Invariant Cones for a Family of Matrices
A thorough analysis on necessary and sufficient conditions for certain sets of matrices to leave a common invariant cone. This includes matrices that are simultaneously diagonalizable and that share a dominant eigenvector. Linear Algebra and Its Applications 2010.
Fully Secure Accountable-Authority Identity-Based Encryption
Expands the accountable-authority encryption scheme where the key-generation authority in an identity-based encryption scheme to full CPA security under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) Assumption. PKC 2011.
The Goldston-Pintz-Yildirim Sieve and Maximal Gaps
Improves results on the maximal gap in a block of N primes based on techniques introduced in the Goldston-Pintz-Yildirim Sieve. Sole author, supported by Fulbright Grant to Hungary. Acta Arithmetica 139 2009.
Worry-Free Encryption: Functional Encryption with Public Keys
In this work, we define a new concept of worry-free encryption in a public-key context that can embed access restrictions into PKE in a way that allows decoding only if the recipient satisfied a given attribute policy. Cited over 100 times since publication. CCS 2010.
Reducing Trust when Trust is Essential
PhD Thesis - 2012. Examines a wide variety of contexts from secret sharing to multi-party computation and attribute-based encryption and proposes many novel ways in which trust in the required central authority can be relaxed.