200 XMR sent from the general donation fund.
Hire PhD mathematician to look into post-quantum crypto, ZK[...]
suraeNoether posted this 7 years ago
WHAT: Hire me, a newly-minted Ph.D. Mathematician for research, mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, paper publication, grant writing, and educational/professional outreach. Goals include minimizing blockchain bloat, ensuring Monero is robust in a post-quantum world, and investigating ZK protocols. See below for details.
WHO: My name is Brandon Goodell. I worked under the pseudonym Surae Noether earlier in graduate school. I have a B.Sc. in math from Colorado State University, an M.Sc. in math from North Dakota State University and, in a few weeks, a Ph.D. from Clemson University in Mathematical Sciences. My research in academica, working chronologically backward, involved integral domains in commutative algebra, computationally efficient models of neurons, and modeling disease propagation deterministically and stochastically. I can make my CV available to anyone who wants a copy, and there is a bit more detail about my Ph.D. work at the end of this.
WHY: Crypto is an arms race, and Monero is in a rather fragile position. The way I see it, Monero is facing the following problems in the near future, in no particular order: (1) any system built without zero-knowledge protocols is leaking info with each broadcast transaction, (2) post-quantum cryptography is going to be a requirement, and (3) blockchain bloat: block size is proportional to key size and key size is proportional to privacy. I can't promise to fix each of these issue, but I can promise to devote my time and energy into new proposals towards their eventual solution.
PROPOSAL, EXPIRATION: Hire me for 1050 Monero for June, July, and August 2017. At the discretion of the community renew on a quarterly basis (adjusting for exchange rate to USD).
Primary job description: Discover and vet new ideas and community proposals, participate in community conversations on IRC, the forum, reddit, and disseminate any rigorous results I develop (proofs or counter-proofs of security, technical reports with formal plausibility and security analyses, white papers, peer reviewed publications, and speaking at conferences). Previous contributions to Monero along these lines included Shen's Ring CT and my previous work on chain reactions. The emphasis of the bulk of this work will be on points (1), (2), and (3) from the WHY section: zero knowledge protocols, post-quantum crypto, and blockchain bloat.
In addition to this, one of my long-term goals for MRL is for the lab to be self-sufficient to remove the burden from the community members. Finding external sources of funding (possibly through grants, possibly through other sources) will likely be an annual tradition with an eye toward that goal. Publication of white papers including plausibility and security analyses, together with submissions to peer-reviewed scientific journals, will make up the component of my work most visibile to the community; if I can manage to actually land a grant, that would be a completely different animal.
My tertiary job may include educational and professional outreach, depending on how the community feels. I have ideas for educational outreach programs ranging from high school to college to graduate school; I think this would be a fun way to get the next generation of coders interested in crypto and the future backbone of financial data structures. I also have ideas for professional outreach. This involves cultivating talent in the academic worlds of the math and computer science communities, as well as encouraging the talent already in our communities... I would like to organize an annual technical cryptocurrency conference to invite the active and thoughtful members of the Monero community, other cryptocurrency communities, the academic community to discuss the goldmine of thought experiments swirling around cryptocurrencies.
MILESTONES: Since this is not a finite project with a well-defined outcome, milestone assessment may be an impractical way to judge progress. We could judge my progress by number of papers published each quarter or each year, but that provides motivation for me to produce least-publishable-units (LPU): short papers that say just enough to get me paid. I won't have time to necessarily put out higher quality, in depth publications if I have a quota to meet. I do not think it is in the interest of quality research to work under an LPU incentive.
However, I like the idea of writing an MRL newsletter each quarter that summarizes mine and other members' contributions to the Monero community and toward the MRL research efforts. This newsletter would, presumably, be an investor's reality check that their money is not being wasted. Certainly, investors will see the white and peer-reviewed papers put out by MRL in addition to this newsletter, and although the peer review process can be agonizingly slow, papers can be posted to ArXiV in the midst of review. For these reasons, I am not tremendously concerned that it will be difficult to convince the community of my worth in terms of reearch output, but it would be nice to produce a newsletter as both a brag for our educational outreach work and to satisfy the notion of a milestone for investors. Of course, I'm absolutely open to suggestions.
Lastly: I had a very good time working for MRL last time around and there is lots of room for improving my work (I was young... alas). You can find my graduate student page here. For more details about me: my PhD qualifying exams were in abstract algebra, real analysis, and mathematical statistics. My coursework has touched on a very wide range of mathematics... an incomplete list includes topology and graph theory, algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, cryptography and coding theory, real and complex analysis, harmonic/Fourier/functional analysis, mathematical statistics, variational calculus, and pattern recognition/machine learning. I starting programming computers in middle school, and over the years I have coded in C, C++, Java, Python (2), and (if you count them as programming languages rather than software packages) in R, Mathematica, Matlab, and Maple. You can find my github at https://www.github.com/b-g-goodell where I have a shitty automated Coinbase bitcoin trader, a shitty evolutionary algorithm for training recurrent neural networks, and a not-so-shitty "probabilistic neural network," which is a dead-simple pattern recognition device. I have been teaching throughout graduate school, courses ranging in difficulty from business calculus to differential equations for engineers and proof writing for undergraduate math majors.
Hey everyone! I wanted to write a quick post to thank everyone again for funding me, and to provide a quick update on my progress.
Everyone seemed rather keen on the idea of a newsletter/research roadmap, so at the end of each 3-month period, I'm going to write up a little newsletter with a picture of where we've been, where we are, and where we are going. But since I just began, I figured that I should write up a brief initial description of the topics that will be under investigation in the first 3 months. This way, the community doesn't need to wait 3 full months to see what I'm getting up to. Here is the first MRL Research Roadmap. Expect another at the end of August.
In this case, it's little more than a to-do list ranked roughly by urgency and timeline: urgent or short projects come first on the list, non-urgent or longer-term projects occur later in the list. Future research roadmaps will include details on the progress of each of these items, will have new items added to it, old items removed, and so on. I'm seeking feedback for this roadmap. If someone has a pet project, or a suspected security flaw, we should reshuffle the list around as appropriate.
The first item on the list is not really a to-do but a brag, as it is a rather exciting development. A graduate student in computer science named Jeffrey Quesnelle at the University of Michigan-Dearborne has contacted MRL and is interested in dabbling with cryptocurrencies for his thesis! He has already written a literature review for me on the history of ZK-SNARKs, related constructions, and how they relate to cryptocurrencies. We will be whipping this into shape for a peer review publication by the end of my first 3-month period with MRL at the latest (first round of copy-editing is almost complete, just waiting on me to finish up a few pages of notes). Jeffrey is willing to do work on behalf of MRL like prototyping new cryptosystems. His experience includes cryptography in vehicles for the automotive industry and has interests regarding the internet-of-things, so if anyone has any other tasks for Jeffrey, we can always put him through the ringer :D
You will notice this roadmap covers a lot of ground, from immediate small projects to pie-in-the-sky future-proofing. None of this is guaranteed, and some of these projects could take years, even with many many contributors, so do not consider this a list of things that will be coming to Monero soon (although some high-urgency, short-term projects will be seeing something rather soon by necessity). These are essentially the big buckets I'm currently putting my efforts into. Again, I'm seeking feedback, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Donated +20
Thanks again, everyone! I'm pretty astounded and impressed by the amount of support everyone is giving me, it's a very nice welcome!
Hi, Brandon, welcome back.
In addition to this, one of my long-term goals for MRL is for the lab to be self-sufficient to remove the burden from the community members. Finding external sources of funding (possibly through grants, possibly through other sources) will likely be an annual tradition with an eye toward that goal.
With those actions come a shifting of power and influence. I think such actions should not be taken lightly.
You are not wrong... there are a few points here, though, that I think are important. First and most simply, MRL is not the core team. If I make terrible recommendations, the core team can (AND SHOULD) ignore me. Examples of everyone ignoring me at will: (1) if the core team and community thinks I shouldn't seek external grants, then that should be removed from my job description, (2) even if we get MRL funded externally, MRL is not obligated to take the money (i.e. I'd rather apply and turn it down than not apply and never have the chance to turn it down) and (3) even if we accept external funding for MRL, the core team is under no obligation to listen to my results.
Secondly, and long-windedly, let me explain why I even inserted the idea into my first post. There's this problem I have with grant-based systems. A lot of STEM disciplines out there are grant-based; engineering, chemistry, etc. You publish or you perish, and you get grants or you perish. It's just the way of the research world in certain corners, especially education. This isn't entirely for bad reasons; offloading the cost of research away from the students and toward external sources makes paying for professors easier, and therefore makes education cheaper (imagine how much universities would charge if they were footing the bill for big physics projects instead of the Department of Energy...)
Until relatively recently, the math world hasn't exactly been considered a grant-based discipline. Computational mathematics has always required lots of funding for resources, but an algebraist or a topologist, historically, could do their work in a field of posies with a pen and paper. But recent trends in education has put pressure on math departments in many US universities to start seeking grants and funding (and so you start seeing a lot fewer pure mathematicians and a lot more computational mathematicians filling up departments, because provosts and deans put pressure on departments to hire professors who get grants... and because we need more computational research in a world where computers are increasingly dominating our lives). Consequently, almost every project pitches and applications in academia need to come equipped with four parts: (i) how will this help research? (ii) how will this help students? (iii) how will this serve the department/school/committee administratively? (iv) how will this help you get a grant?
Areas in math that are computational, or algorithmic, or related to simulations, or related to solving real-world logistic problems and optimization, these are areas that get grants because the ideas can be applied immediately and we see benefit immediately. An area like cryptocurrency has an astonishingly higher chance of getting grants than an area like commutative algebra, topology, or category theory. These areas are significantly less likely to get a grant because the applications of those extremely "pure" areas of math can take hundreds of years to crystallize. Sometimes that's not the case. Topology swept the Nobel prizes last year in physics. But my general point remains, which is the problem I have with grant-based systems, which is this.
My honest-to-god opinion? If this was a completely ideal world, I would completely agree with you. Personally, I think that expecting a mathematically-driven research group to become self-funded, while an admirable goal for any research group, is bad for a bunch of reasons. It's unlikely to be fruitful because grants in math are rare in the first place, it monetizes research, it takes away time from research, and overall, I didn't get into math research because I like writing grants. I don't like that our society has pushed math research in that direction. Your wariness is important. If some US government intelligence agency gives us a grant and MRL subsequently makes a proposal for a new signature scheme (or something), it would be reasonable for the community to be concerned about a repeat of the dual elliptic curve controversy involving the NSA from years ago.
Having said all that... the basic idea of alleviating the burden of funding research from the community, I think, is still a good one. And even though I'm not a fan of writing grants, and even though I don't think anyone here would be totally comfortable (if AT ALL comfortable) accepting an NSA grant... what if the granting agency is the National Science Foundation? Or some program through MIT's various cryptocurrency projects? I'm not convinced the idea of external funding is a good idea... but neither am I convinced it is a bad idea. And...
As I said earlier... I would rather apply and turn the money down than not apply. Then again... I may be the sort of guy who asked two girls out to prom in school so I'd have the option...