🚧 Under Construction 🚧
0xPARC
Past: MIT S.B. & M.Eng., EECS · Bridgewater Associates · Early Dropbox · Humble Audio
My family moved to the Philadelphia area. I didn't know anyone and I was already hooked on computers. I spent most of the summer installing Slackware over and over again. OpenBSD came later. Countless hours configuring and recompiling kernels, struggling to get dial-up working with minicom and pppd. Different times.
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.
For the next four years, I was glued to hacker channels on IRC. Firewalls, packet filters, honeypots. Traceroute'd and nmap'd all over the place.
Studied computer science and engineering — undergrad through master's. Distributed systems with Robert Morris, security with Rivest, operating systems with Kaashoek, microcomputer project lab soldering at 2am. The curriculum said engineering but the education was learning that computation could be a medium, not just a tool.
Wi-Fi threat analysis for MIT's network infrastructure. Packet inspection and protocol analysis at Mazu Networks. Adversarial research at CSAIL that got published at NDSS and adopted by OpenSSH. A master's thesis on delegation of authority at Lincoln Lab.
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.
Built mission-critical transaction cost optimization module for the alpha trading platform — dynamic programming-based optimization for billions in daily trades. Built options trading and hedging engine. The kind of place where your code either works or someone notices very quickly.
Portfolio analytics, monitoring and analyzing client strategic beta portfolios. Moved from building the systems to understanding what they were optimizing for.
Led mobile engineering from zero to a hundred million users over five and a half years. First author of the iOS client. Led every iOS and Android release for five years. Led engineering and product for partnerships with Samsung and HTC — a hundred million phones. Co-designed the first third-party developer APIs. Multiple patents. Managed up to ten engineers.
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 gain a deepr intuition for how FM parameters affect results. Hardware, firmware, DSP, product design, and all the rest.
When I started making music with Ableton Live in my 20s, it was clear I was more interested in how the audio processing worked. 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 taught me how to put engineering in service of building something people actually want to use. I wanted to put those skills toward something I loved dearly—music, and hardware was the way.
Contributed to Output's Arcade 2.0—tricky resource management issues and general under-the-hood application work.
Building on the Quad Operator, I started on a full-featured tabletop instrument. Hands down the most ambitious project I've taken on solo (well....mostly). 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. I solved lots of hard problems and the prototype got fun to use. But hardware is hard, there was a ton of work left on the table, and I was working mostly solo and needing a change. That work has been shelved—for now. The FM synth at the bottom of this page adapts some of this unreleased work.
When it became clear it was time to get savvier about machine learning, I took a few weeks of time for Deep Learning for Music Information Retrieval at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. VAEs for timbre, DDSP for differentiable synthesis, transformers for sequence modeling. Where the audio work meets the ML world.
Co-executive produced a documentary, now streaming on Resident Advisor.
In-venue streaming technology directly from the front-of-house mixing desk. Advised Ann Marie and Michael in the early days pinning down their technical leadership.
Mentored CTO Amol Kapoor as he stepped out of doing engineering into leading engineering.
Exploring applications of fully homomorphic encryption. FHE enables computation on encrypted data. An academic thread for many years, it's now becoming practical for production environments. What shall we build with it?
Conway's Game of Life running entirely over CKKS fully homomorphic encryption. The server calculates on encrypted board states and incorporates encrypted inputs from browser client. The kind of project that makes you reconsider what computation can be.
0xPARC strives to envision, invent, and improve the digital ecology of the future.
FM SYNTH is a simple 6-operator frequency modulation synthesizer with capabilities similar to the Yamaha DX7. This is a demo-grade adaptation of unreleased Humble Audio work.
Synthesis implementation is WASM-compiled Rust. Audio-reactive generative backgrounds in WebGPU.
Special thanks to Claude for coding assistance and musical stylings.