Background
An academic computer scientist who escaped the lab.
Professional Goals:
- Make users own their identites and data online.
- Make surveillance capitalism unprofitable.
- Make data silos a liability.
Training:
- PhD from Princeton in May 2018
- MA from Princeton in October 2012
- BS from University of Arizona in May 2010
Industry:
Selected Publications
A few papers I helped write:
- Ali, M., Nelson, J., Shea, R., Freedman, M. "Blockstack: Design and Implementation of a Global Naming System with Blockchains." USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2016. June 22-24, 2016. Denver, CO, USA.
- Nelson, J., Ali, M., Shea, R., Freedman, M. "Extending Existing Blockchains with Virtualchain." Distributed Cryptocurrencies and Consensus Ledgers 2016. July 25, 2016. Chicago, IL, USA.
- Nelson, J. and Peterson, L. "Syndicate: Virtual Cloud Storage through Provider Composition." ACM 1st Internation Workshop on Software-defined Ecosystems. June 25, 2014. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
A few patents I helped write:
- Nelson, J.,, Blankstein, A., Salibra, L., Liao, K., Little., M. "Platform and associated method for authenticating the identity of a user in a decentralized system without need for a third-party identity service"
- Nelson, J.,"Systems and methods for forming application-specific blockchains"
- Blankstein, A., Nelson, J."System and method for smart contract publishing"
Open Source
Some repositories I work on:
- Stacks 2.0: The reference implementation of the Stacks Blockchain
- SIPs: I am the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee of the Stacks Improvement Proposal process
- Gaia: A high-performance decentralized storage system used by Blockstack dapps.
Some personal projects:
- vdev: A device maanger for UNIX-like systems.
- runfs: A self-cleaning RAM filesystem.
- Syndicate: A scalable software-defined storage system for wide-area networks.
Social media