About me

I founded SecretBit Ventures, an independent research firm. I also work as a Senior Research Scientist at OpenMined and as a Visiting Researcher at the University Of Virginia. Earlier, I helped lead Devron, a data-science platform that protects enterprise privacy. I ran its research and development team, turning ideas like vertical federated learning, privacy controls, and AI-based privacy checks into product verticals. I also managed day-to-day engineering with the company's leadership.

Before moving to industry, I spent almost ten years in academia studying applied cryptography and privacy tools. I was a postdoctoral researcher at the RISE Lab with Professor Raluca Ada Popa, and I earned my PhD at Princeton University with Professor Prateek Mittal. My work covers secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, differential privacy, and other ways to compute on data safely. Many of these ideas now drive open-source projects and startups.

I earned a B.Tech. with Honors in Engineering Physics from IIT Madras. To learn more about my recent projects, see my publications page or explore my academic lineage.

"Theory is the first term in the Taylor series of practice."      
-Tom Cover