Sylvan Clebsch

概要

I’ve spent most of my career trying to make computers do difficult things without making programmers suffer for it. My route into research was indirect: startups, embedded operating systems, secure systems, VoIP, simulation and graphics, a detour through investment banking, and eventually a PhD at Imperial College London. That experience made me suspicious of elegant ideas that collapse on contact with reality. I’m most interested in the opposite kind: ideas that eliminate an “unavoidable” trade-off and make ambitious systems possible.

I designed Pony, and my work on Project Verona explores how type systems, runtimes, operating systems, and hardware can cooperate to make systems software safer without surrendering performance. The same instinct drives my work on software supply-chain security and transparency, confidential computing and confidential containers, and attested hypervisors: replacing “trust me” with evidence about what software is running, where it came from, and how data is protected while in use.