Martin Kleppmann

Like the industry people will say, ah, that's theoretical, that's academic.

It's got nothing to do with the real world, and they're really missing a trick there, because actually there are a lot of interesting insights from research that are very relevant to the real world, but they're not necessarily making their way across that chasm.

In the other direction, the academics will say, oh, this industry stuff, you know, that's just engineering.

They're not actually doing any interesting thinking.

It's just like writing routine stuff.

I think I see it as one of my goals to try and build better respect across both in both directions by bringing interesting insights from research into industrial practice, but also by informing our research by the problems that arise in real world.

And so that way, like joining those two things up a bit better.

What are your current research topics that you're working on, ones that you're excited about?

I have two main areas I'm working on at the moment.

One is local-first software.

So that's this idea that we want collaborative software like Google Docs, like Figma, etc., but in a way that gives better protection to users' data.

that's less dependent on a single cloud provider who can lock you out of your files and that's therefore more resilient, gives users greater agency and greater autonomy over their own data.

So that's an area that I've been working on for the last 10 years or so through a mixture of open source work and algorithm development and formal verification and so on.

I'm now also trying to set up a brand new research area in a totally different topic

which is on using cryptography to prove things about the physical world.

So I'm interested there in especially sustainability related things.

So for example, if you want to verify that the carbon emissions involved in manufacturing a particular product were X, and you want to be sure that that number is correct, because maybe you want to include emissions as part of your purchasing decision and choose the product with the lower emissions for that to be meaningful, then the emissions number has to be correct.

And unfortunately, at the moment, the numbers are generally not correct because the incentives are to lie and cheat and to use creative accounting techniques all as a way of like greenwashing, basically.

Or a related thing is happening in the EU, for example, which is bringing in new regulations on preventing deforestation of tropical rainforests.

So that's, for example, coffee, cocoa, palm oil, etc.