0xPARC
Exploring applications of fully homomorphic encryption. FHE enables computation on encrypted data. An academic thread for many years, it's becoming increasingly practical for production environments.
I'm an engineer who understands the world through signals and systems. Music is where I first felt the intuition underpinning everything—feedback, resonance, time-frequency duality. The same mathematics keeps showing up in everything I've worked on: information security, trading systems, mobile platforms, audio synthesis hardware, encrypted computation.
Current
The encrypted game of life
Conway's Game of Life running entirely within CKKS FHE. The server computes on encrypted state and inputs, fully blind to both.
Demo may be offline—reach out if you'd like to see it running.
On the 0xPARC mission—
Origins
Summer of '97
My family moved to the Philadelphia area. Not knowing anyone and already hooked on computers, I spent countless hours reconfiguring & compiling the Linux kernel, getting dial-up working, and writing my first lines of C. Different times.
Beyond HOPE & Daft Punk
New York City. Attended 2600 Magazine's Beyond HOPE conference. Bought Daft Punk's Homework at the Virgin Megastore Times Square. It was the most pivotal weekend of my life up to that point.
High school years
For the next four years, I was glued to hacker channels on IRC. I dove into firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection, honeypots. The tracerouting, scanning, and capturing were endless.
The reading list
- TCP/IP Illustrated — W. Richard Stevens
- Applied Cryptography — Bruce Schneier
- Seizing the Enigma — David Kahn
- The Puzzle Palace — James Bamford
- Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
- Neuromancer — William Gibson
MIT
S.B. & M.Eng., Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Distributed Systems with Robert Morris, Computer & Network Security with Ron Rivest, Operating Systems, Microcontroller Lab. Signals & Systems changed the way I understand just about everything.
Outside the classroom, I pursued interests in information security: I worked with the MIT IS&T security team (incident response and systems evaluation), interned at Mazu Networks (engineering on traffic analysis and TCP stream reconstruction), co-researched SSH attack propagation & proposed mitigations at MIT CSAIL, and did a master's thesis in delegation-based authorization at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
On the research
Co-authored "Inoculating SSH Against Address Harvesting" with Schechter, Jung, and McLain at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory — countermeasures adopted by OpenSSH and a major commercial SSH vendor.
M.Eng thesis: Towards a Deployable Framework for Delegation of Authority in Network Applications — fine-grained delegation of authority, dynamic library interposition, security protocol design. Advised by Stuart Schechter & Hari Balakrishnan.
Bridgewater Associates
Technology Associate
Worked on trading engines in Bridgewater's Account Management department, the group responsible for translating views on markets to trades that need execution. I rewrote the algorithms within Bridgewater's portfolio construction and transaction cost optimization process. This engine sat at the center of Bridgewater's trading pipeline, generating billions of dollars of orders for execution by the trading department. I also built an equity option hedging engine.
Investment Associate
Shifted from building the systems to understanding what they were optimizing for. Portfolio analytics, monitoring and analyzing client strategic beta portfolios.
Dropbox
Scaling Mobile Engineering
Led mobile engineering from 0 to 100+ million active users. First author of the iOS client, eventual iOS and Android engineering team lead. Built Dropbox's first developer APIs. Led product and engineering for Samsung and HTC partnerships.
Humble Audio
Quad Operator
Founded Humble Audio and shipped the Quad Operator — A new take on Frequency Modulation synthesis for eurorack modular. The module features a one-control-per-function interface, offering the opportunity to gain a deeper intuition for how FM parameters affect results. Hardware, firmware, DSP, product design, and all the rest.
On building for musicians
When I started making music with Ableton Live in my 20s, it was clear I was more interested in how the audio processing worked than in the actual music making. Screen fatigue was extreme—I had zero desire to sit in front of a computer after work, and lots of creative folks I talked to felt the same way. My Dropbox years gave me an immense appreciation for the challenge of making tools for users, not just doing slick engineering. I wanted to put those skills toward something I loved dearly—music. It was my opportunity to have an influence on the music I couldn't make myself. Tool-making with DSP & hardware became the way.
Consulting at Output
Resolved some tricky resource management issues in Output's Arcade 2.0.
Deeper down the hardware rabbit hole
Building on the Quad Operator, I started on a full-featured tabletop instrument—the most ambitious engineering project I've taken on solo. The hardware: Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with five MCUs, an audio CODEC, capacitive touch sensing, and LED driving across the chip network. The software: careful Linux kernel tuning, device drivers, real-time audio DSP. That work has been shelved for now. The FM synth at the bottom of this page adapts some of it.
Taking Back the Groove
Co-executive produced this documentary telling the story of Bronx-born disco legend Richie Weeks' journey to reclaim control of his copyrights.
Advisory
Mixhalo
Advised the founders as they established their early technical leadership.
SOOT
Mentored the CTO as he began leading a team for the first time. I particularly enjoy this kind of advisory.