My research focuses on building new theoretical foundations and practical protocols for blockchains and cryptocurrencies. My work focuses on making blockchains more scalable, easier and safer to program, and privacy-friendly. Earlier I co-authored the first peer-reviewed publication on Bitcoin and the first peer-reviewed publication on decentralized smart contracts. I was also the first to teach … Continued
My research group creates new sensing and interface technologies that foster more powerful and delightful interactions between humans and computers. These efforts often lie in emerging use modalities, such as wearable computing, augmented reality, smart environments, and gestural interfaces. In addition to computer science, my research often incorporates machine learning, computer vision, embedded processing, sensors, … Continued
My research focuses on core problems within theoretical computer science and their connections to areas outside of computer science. The unifying theme of my work is generating and applying new computational and algorithmic insights through interactions between these disciplines and theoretical computer science. Two major recent themes in our works have been distributed computation and … Continued
My research goal is to develop micro camera systems that have high imaging performance and facilitate better visual intelligence.
My research focuses on randomness and computing. Many randomized algorithms are faster than algorithms that don’t use randomness. Scientists use random numbers to simulate complex systems such as the climate. Computer security is impossible without random numbers. On the other hand, computers use ad hoc sources of randomness that are really only slightly random. It … Continued
My research combines mathematics, computer science, probability, and statistics, in order to develop algorithms with improved accuracy for large-scale and complex estimation problems in phylogenomics (genome-scale phylogeny estimation), multiple sequence alignment, metagenomics, and historical linguistics. I work especially on the hardest computational problems in these areas, where large dataset sizes and model complexity makes existing … Continued
My research focus is on finding new methods to secure stored data by encryption. I am laying the foundations for an entirely different vision for encryption that I call Functional Encryption. Instead of encrypting to individual users, in a Functional Encryption system, one can embed how they want to share data in the encryption process. … Continued
I am working in coding theory, a field where mathematics, engineering, and computer science inextricably come together. My research has led to a better understanding of error-correcting codes that are used to encode information whenever it is transmitted or stored. Since such codes are deployed in a plethora of devices, from computer drives to cell … Continued
I build systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. I call this Human Computation, but others sometimes call it Crowdsourcing. Some of my past projects include: CAPTCHA, The ESP Game (acquired by Google), GWAP, reCAPTCHA (acquired by Google) and Duolingo, which aims to teach users a foreign … Continued
I am interested in algorithms and the interface of computing and economics, the area concerned with designing systems and algorithms for selfish users. My research focuses on algorithms and games on networks, as well as network-flow algorithms, approximation algorithms, and quantifying the efficiency of selfish routing.