Riad is a member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a leading academic researcher on zero-knowledge proofs and their applications, and is also responsible for the design and specification of several cryptographic protocols that form the basis for the security of Ethereum, Avalanche, and many other blockchains.

Riad was previously a cryptographic researcher at Algorand, and spent a decade as an analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit designer at Silicon Labs. Riad received his SB and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, where he was supported by a Ripple Fellowship.

Fraser is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (Software and Societal Systems Department). Her research focuses on security and program correctness, from verifying (parts of) production systems to automatically finding exploitable bugs in real codebases; for example, her tools have found many zero-day bountied bugs and CVEs in the popular Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Fraser also works on compilation; in collaboration with CEO Riad and others, she developed the CirC compiler for cryptographic proof systems. Fraser received her BA in English and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, where she was supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship.

Deian is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he co-leads the Security and Programming Systems groups. His research lies at the intersection of security and programming languages; he is particularly interested in building secure systems that are deployed in production. He was a co-founder of Intrinsic, a runtime security startup acquired by VMware in 2019.

His work has been recognized with a Most Influential Paper award (ICFP 2022), a Cybersecurity Award for Practice (IEEE 2022), Distinguished Paper awards (POPL 2019, USENIX Security 2020, ICFP 2020, POPL 2021), an NSF CAREER award, and a Sloan Fellowship. He received his BE and ME in Electrical Engineering from Cooper Union and an MS and PhD from Stanford, where he was supported by an NDSEG graduate research fellowship.

Ann is an accomplished strategy executive who spent seven years as a fintech COO in a high-risk consumer segment. For the majority of her career, she has focused on new market expansion, product development, and rapid scaling in early-stage SaaS and fintech companies. She has a rare breadth of technical and management experience spanning risk, product, sales, marketing, customer support, and government contracts.

Her core expertise centers around payment processing, online payments fraud prevention, and anti-money laundering programs, gained from years of building and running a fintech risk team and product in-house. She received a BS in Chemical-Biological Engineering from MIT and is on the Board of Directors for First Generation Alumni of MIT.