Emin Gün Sirer
Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. He was an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and is currently the co-director of IC3. He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems and computer networking. Sirer is also founder of Avalanche protocol, a project related to building computing platform using Avalanche Consensus. Education. Sirer attended high-school at Robert College, received his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, and finished his graduate studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002  under the supervision of Brian N. Bershad. Career. Before becoming a professor at Cornell University Sirer worked at AT&T Bell Labs on Plan 9, at DEC SRC, and at NEC. Sirer is best known for his contributions to operating systems, distributed systems, and fundamental cryptocurrency research. He co-developed the SPIN (operating system), where the implementation and interface of an operating system could be modified safely at run-time by type-safe extension code. He also led the Nexus OS effort, where he developed new techniques for attesting to, and reasoning about, the semantic properties of remote programs. His Karma  system, published in 2003, is the first cryptocurrency that uses a distributed mint based on proof-of-work. In conjunction with his research group, he published the paper "Majority is not Enough, Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable" which described the selfish mining attack, an attack on Bitcoin with only 1/3 of total hash power. He also developed Bitcoin-NG, a bitcoin scaling solution, and Bitcoin Covenants, a security solution. He is also co-founder of bloXroute, a company focusing on solving the forgotten "layer 0" networking layer. Avalanche protocol. Sirer is founder of a project related to computing platform using Avalanche  Consensus and its native token AVAX. The Avalanche project was first incubated at Cornell University, where the research was led by Emin Gün Sirer assisted by Maofan Yin and Kevin Sekniqi. The research resulted in establishing Ava Labs technology company with the purpose of developing an alternative blockchain technology for the financial sector.