>> publications

Fast Convergence of the k-Opinion Undecided State Dynamics in the Population Protocol Model
Talley Amir, James Aspnes, Petra Berenbrink, Felix Biermeier, Dominik Kaaser, Christopher Hahn, John Lazarsfeld.
Under Review: PODC 2023.

Approximate Majority with Catalytic Inputs
Talley Amir, James Aspnes, John Lazarsfeld.
Accepted: OPODIS 2020. Arxiv version available here.

Message Complexity of Population Protocols
Talley Amir, James Aspnes, David Doty, Mahsa Eftekhari, Eric Severson.
Accepted: DISC 2020. Arxiv version available here.

>> education

Yale University
PhD in Computer Science
Aug 2018 - Present
Cumulative GPA: 4.00

Brown University
BSc in Applied Mathematics & Computer Science
Sep 2014 – May 2018
Cumulative GPA: 3.89

>> experience

Trail of Bits
Teaching Fellow in Cryptography & Computer Security
September 2019 – Present
Developed and led weekly problem sessions, held office hours to help students understand course materials.

Yale University
Teaching Fellow in Cryptography & Computer Security
September 2019 – Present
Developed and led weekly problem sessions, held office hours to help students understand course materials.

Eduexplora
Lead Instructor
July 2019, July 2020
Designed and taught two course curricula (one in discrete mathematics, the other in cryptography) to high school students.

Summer STEM Institute
Computer Security Research Mentor
June 2020 – July 2020
Guided two high school students in designing and executing research projects in computer security.

Yale University
Teaching Fellow in Discrete Mathematics
September 2019 – May 2020
Developed and led weekly problem sessions, held office hours to help students understand course materials.

Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale
Full Stack Developer
June 2019 – Jan 2020
Designed, developed, and documented components of an open-source blockchain-based project to support climate accounting.

Brown University
Head Teaching Assistant for Discrete Structures & Probability
Oct 2016 – May 2018
In addition to undergraduate teaching assistant duties (see below), I also helped hire and train a team of UTAs, collaborated with the professor to design the course, and managed a staff of 30 TAs.

Brown University
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Sep 2017 – Jan 2018
Assisted in developing a secure cloud computing model that aims to minimize the amount of data leaked to a server that hosts information about a graph, advised by Roberto Tamassia and Esha Ghosh.

Ernst & Young
Cyber Security Risk Consultant
Jun 2017 – Aug 2017
Developed cyber risk assessment tools, attended meetings and workshops for the purpose of strengthening clients’ security systems, and drafted reports detailing current news in cyber security as well as metrics and benchmarks for tracking progress in cyber-development projects.

Brown University
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for Discrete Structures & Probability
Jan 2016 – May 2016
Drafted homework problems, solutions, and grading rubrics, graded weekly problem sets, and held weekly office hours for helping students with assignments and course materials.

> languages

Spoken
First language is English, conversational in Hebrew and Spanish

Programming and Markup
Python, Scala, Java, MatLab, GoLang, C, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

>> projects

Blockchain Literature Review
Short Paper
Wrote a short survey paper that reviews various blockchain ecosystem designs and created a GitHub repository with summaries of the papers referenced in the survey.

Broadcast Encryption Based on the Naor-Reingold PRF
Short Paper
Wrote a short research paper that defines a broadcast encryption scheme and proves its security by reduction to the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem.

Padding Oracle Attack
Python
Used the padding oracle attack to decrypt a message encrypted using a block cipher in CBC mode.

TCP
Java
Implemented the TCP network protocol API from scratch.

Flag
Go
Given a poorly secured website, discovered vulnerabilities and designed and executed exploits to steal unauthorized information and escalate privileges (e.g. SQL injection, parameter based access control, file injection, cross-site scripting, etc.).

Dropbox
Go
Designed and developed a file hosting system which allows multiple users to register for an account and securely authenticate their credentials to upload and download their personal files.

Bitcoin
Java
Implemented a program that simulates Bitcoin transactions. Given a list of public keys of the current owners of $n$ coins and a list of $t$ transactions, determines whether each transaction contains a valid ECDSA signature on the Secp256k1 curve, performs the transaction if the signature is valid, and prints the final owners of the $n$ coins.

Talley Amir

>> whoami

>> contact

>> publications

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>> experience

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>> projects

>> honors; awards

> links