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ISO/IEC 18013-5 standardizes the Mobile Driver’s License (mDL), which is purportedly a digital credential that represents a person’s driving license information. Here I dissect an example of two important messages specified in this format. Understanding how these bytes are verified was the first step to developing a zero-knowledge protocol for proving “knowledge of an mDL that verifies a given attribute” as described in our recent paper, Anonymous credentials from ECDSA The MSO Lets begin with the inner-most message, the mobile signed object or MSO. The MSO is the byte string that is signed by the issuer. Here is an example: ...

Someone pointed me to the All-In Podcast a few weeks ago. I listen on Saturday mornings at 1.5x because the four-square merry banter reminds me of Entourage. You know, Vinny, Eric, Drama, and Turtle… Vinny made an interesting point in E118 on March 3 2023, humble bragging that Credit Suisse offered him 6.5% interest on 3 month bills! (Well, the offer was to all private banking customers). He goes on trying to make some other point. ...

Peter Zumthor and his family rent three wooden cabins in the Swiss village of Leis and we were lucky enough to spend a weekend there in Nov'21. Zumthor also designed thermal baths in Vals that are formed from massive slabs of local stone. Visiting an Architect’s wooden house About 15min and 500m above the center of the town of Vals, in the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland, one finds the village of Leis with only a handful of houses and a church. Peter Zumthor has built 3 wooden structures in this village, and his family rents them! In the picture below, the highest left-most modern wooden structure is named Oberhus, and staying in it was one of my favorite experiences of living in Switzerland. ...

Working in academia is a privilege. I’ve been on the (tenure track) hiring committee for computer science at Northeastern University during the past few years and wanted to share personal notes on the process. If you are on the market, I hope this helps, and of course, please consider applying to Northeastern. TLDR First, in summary: Be succinct. Reach out to people you know. Apply even if you think you are not ready. Many schools including ours now offer various forms of fellowships for scientists who are early in their career. Make your application succinct Last year, our hiring committee evaluated at least 600 applications for 7 tenure-track lines (some were joint appointments). Each application received several reviews, with the top 150 receiving at least 3. At this stage, however, the committee members I informally polled spent about 10–15 minutes to read through an application package. ...