I am a protocol engineer at Provable, working on scalable blockchain systems. Furthermore, I did work on machine learning model inference in zero knowledge proofs. Before that, I did my Ph.D. at KIT in Germany, advised by Ali Sunyaev. Over the summer of 2022, I was a visiting researcher at the Systopia lab of UBC Vancouver, hosted by Ivan Beschastnikh. Previously, I graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
My research interests are in privacy-preserving machine learning, and blockchain-based data marketplaces for AI.
Crypto Work
Selected engineering work around zero-knowledge and the Aleo blockchain:
zkML transpiler: a Python→Leo transpiler that turns ML models into Leo code, lets you execute the transpiled code from Python, and generates zk proofs.
snarkOS scaling: performance and reliability work across proving and networking paths aimed at lower latency and higher throughput.
Know Your Address (KYA): a ZK pattern on Aleo that proves a human-not just a private key or unsupervised agent-approved an action, with client-side biometrics and on-chain proof verification (demo).
Artificial Intelligence as a Service (Business & Information Systems Engineering)
Sebastian Lins,
Konstantin D. Pandl,
Heiner Teigeler,
Scott Thiebes,
Calvin Bayer,
Ali Sunyaev
cii lab@KIT, Federated Learning and Data Valuation, Current Research (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, May 2022)
Convergence of AI and DLT – review and future research agenda [Slides] | BloG3 research project - blockchain-based health data management (Oasis Labs, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 2020)
How the Convergence of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence will Benefit Healthcare Researchers (Blockchain for Science Conference, Berlin, November 2019) [Video][Abstract]
Indie-Hacking
Besides crypto work and research, I like to stay current with large ML models by building small products end-to-end. During my time in academia, while writing our HICSS paper on
AI as a Service (AIaaS) adoption,
I had to transcribe and analyze long interviews and learned first-hand how critical good transcripts are. That experience nudged me to put AIaaS into practice and ship my own service:
InstantTranscriber - see the academic transcription workflow - a pragmatic speech-to-text tool focused on fast, accurate transcripts for interviews and podcasts.