Projects
Open Source Projects
Improved Smart Contract Technologies
I’m not a cryptocurrency guy, but I think there are a lot of exciting opportunities in the blockchain / crypto space, particularly surrounding smart contracts. I created Grantkey as a functional prototype for processing peer-to-peer smart contracts via a trusted guarantor as part of a research project for my Advanced Project in Computer Science course. The technology is decentralized in the sense that any mutually trusted third party can serve as the guarantor and any party can verify the legitimacy of the guarantor validation signature making it impossible to undo a validated transaction without having the recipient of the undone transaction be able to prove that the guarantor tampered with the blockchain.
Building Tools for Democracy
I’m very interested in contributing to the construction of tools that will help create a more transparent democracy. One tool that I think could do tremendous good across the world is an election system that is both transparent and verifiable while still preserving voter privacy. I wrote Modeling Verifiable Voting that Protects Privacy to provide a simplified model of how a database could be constructed to achieve this result and wrote the post Verifiable Election System Demo to provide a demonstration of the frontend system using Angular.
DBMS Based on Relational Algebra
Every week I meet with a group of friends to discuss the mechanics of a DBMS based on the relational algebra which would solve some of the problems created by the 3VL of traditional SQL. We are using Haskell to each create our own implementations of the specifications we discuss.
Proprietary Projects
Stock Market Prediction
While I believe that, for the most part, the best approximation for the expected value of alpha is zero, my suspicion is that there are occasional non-repeatable opportunities where the market misjudges the risk premium that should be placed on a particular security. Whenever I am successful in identifying such an opportunity, I will write about it once the economic profits from the strategy have been competed away. Additionally, whenever I identify a strategy without benefits, I will be sure to share it right away as in the post Price Targets a Poor Predictor of Performance.
News Rating Tools
SpeedFeeder is a news rating tool where users can submit news articles and have them rated by the community on the metrics of interest and reliability. This app is fully functional and is deployed to AWS. It was created using node, angular, and postgres.