Ethan Heilman | Bitcoin Research Collaborator
Ethan is CTO and Co-Founder of BastionZero, where he is building OpenPubkey. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University and is the author of over ten technical papers on cryptocurrency, blockchain, cryptography, and network security. He is the inventor of the TumbleBit protocol and has contributed to Bitcoin Core. In his spare time, he enjoys breaking hash functions.
Quanquan Liu | Student Collaborator
Quanquan is currently a research intern at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative for Summer 2019. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the MIT Theory of Computation group, advised by Erik D. Demaine. Her research interests include graph algorithms (both in the sequential and parallel/distributed sense), consensus for blockchains, proofs of space/work, and local models of computation. She seeks to apply local techniques to a variety of theoretical and practical problems.
Quanquan received her B. S. in Computer Science and Mathematics and her Master of Engineering in Computer Science also from MIT. To see her full list of publications, please see: http://web.mit.edu/quanquan/www/.
Philipp Schmidt | Collaborator
J. Philipp Schmidt is Director of Learning Innovation at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the ML Learning initiative, teaches courses, and conducts research on learning communities. He is also a cofounder and board member of Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a non-profit organization that provides access to online higher education through public libraries. Philipp served on the founding board of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, co-authored the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, and is an advisor to a number of non-profit and for-profit education projects. He has received Shuttleworth and Ashoka fellowships, and came to MIT as a Media Lab Director's fellow.
Andy Lippman | Collaborator
Andrew Lippman is a senior research scientist at MIT and associate director of the Media Lab. He has been with the Lab since its inception. Lippman’s work here has ranged from digital video and HDTV to graphical interfaces and networking. He heads the Lab's Viral Communications research group, which examines scalable, real-time systems whose capacity increases with the number of members. This new approach to communications, human transactions, and broadcasting migrates "mainframe communications" technology to distributed, personally defined, cooperative communicators.
Patrick Murck | Collaborator
Patrick is a lawyer and expert on bitcoin and blockchain-based technologies. He will conduct research into the law and policy implications of bitcoin, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Previously Patrick was a co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation where he served at times as General Counsel and Executive Director. Patrick has engaged regulators and policymakers in the US and Europe on bitcoin and the emerging digital economy. He was named among America’s 50 Outstanding General Counsel for 2014 by the National Law Journal. Patrick also serves as President Board member for the BitGive Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on charitable giving and social impact using bitcoin.