Christopher Thorpe

Contact Info: Office: Christopher Thorpe Babel Research One Penn Plaza, Suite 1608 New York NY 10119 Email: cateecs.harvard.edu

Obligatory Photo:

Dr. Christopher Thorpe finished a Ph.D. and taught Computer Science 286r at Harvard in Spring 2008. Christopher Thorpe refers to himself in the third person at the beginning of the web page so that Google excerpts a reasonable part of the page. (This trick worked!)

Academic Affiliations:

• A.B. in Computer Science and Music, 1998
• S.M. in Computer Science, 2006
• Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2008
• My advisors were Michael O. Rabin and David C. Parkes. Avi Pfeffer, my former advisor, honored me by serving on my thesis committee. Margo Seltzer and  Luis Viceira, Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School, completed my committee.

Research Interests and papers:

• Real-world applications of cryptography, including publicly verifiable sealed-bid auctions and other e-commerce applications, spam prevention, email retraction, and electronic voting. My dissertation, “Provably Correct, Secrecy Preserving Computation and its Applications in Auctions and Securities Exchanges”, is based on much of the following research and outlines a general model of efficient, secrecy-preserving computation, with applications to secure auctions and information hiding in securities exchanges.
  • Christopher Thorpe: Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Large Stock Trades (in progress)
  • Michael O. Rabin, Rocco A. Servedio and Christopher Thorpe: Highly Efficient Secrecy-Preserving Proofs of Correctness of Computations and Applications, Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS '07)
  • Christopher Thorpe and David C. Parkes: Cryptographic Securities Exchanges, Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security '07
  • Michael O. Rabin and Christopher Thorpe: Time-Lapse Cryptography, 2006, Harvard SEAS Technical Report TR-22-06
  • D. C. Parkes, M. O. Rabin, S. M. Shieber, C. A. Thorpe: Practical secrecy-preserving, verifiably correct and trustworthy auctions, published in the 2006 International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC '06) [ACM Citation]
  • D. C. Parkes, M. O. Rabin, S. M. Shieber, C. A. Thorpe: Practical secrecy-preserving, verifiably correct and trustworthy auctions (journal version), to appear in Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
  • Christopher Thorpe: Efficient Cryptographic Combinatorial Auctions, 2007, in progress
• Security, economics and art in massively multiplayer online worlds.
  • Christopher Thorpe, Jessica Hammer, Jean Camp, Jon Callas, and Mike Bond: Virtual Economies: Threats and Risks, Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security '07
• Computer models of music, and their use in tasks such as composer identification, composition, missing part reconstruction, optical music recognition, and theoretical analysis
  
  • C.P.U. Bach: Markov Models for Chorale Harmonization was my Harvard undergrad senior thesis in Computer Science and Music.
  I was primarily advised by the late David Lewin whom I consider one of the most influential teachers and mentors I have ever had.
• Automated use of freely available information on the Internet for predictions in finance
• Natural language analysis of Latin texts to provide insight on authorship and relationships among authors and texts.
• Systems administration (I don't actively think about this much anymore. This paper was written and accepted when I was a senior in college.)
  
  • Christopher Thorpe: SSU: Extending SSH for Secure Root Administration, published in the USENIX systems administration conference LISA '98.

Commercial Work:

• From 1998-2000 I worked on e-commerce at Yahoo!, after the startup I was with, Viaweb, was acquired by the big Y. Some of my user interfaces are still in use on Yahoo! Store and Shopping. Before leaving, I was responsible for leading the engineering efforts in the internationalization of Yahoo's e-commerce properties, including Auctions, Store, Shopping, Classifieds, and others.
• From 2000-2002 I worked on internationalization of VoiceXML and speech recognition software at Tellme Networks. I coordinated efforts among dozens of engineers, content developers and speech experts in Belgium and California to deliver an internationalized voice application platform running on North American and European telephony infrastructure. Tellme was acquired by Microsoft in April 2007.
• I also founded two startups that didn't make it. Ask me why.
  One answer: "All successful startups resemble one another, but each unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way." (me, after Tolstoy)
• I moved my bullet point list of thoughts on startups here.

Vocations and Other Interesting Facts:

• Singing, conducting, and composing in the style of early music
  • Nunc Dimittis, Short Service in A, 2002
  • Nunc Dimittis, Dorian Short Service, 2007. Dedicated to those affected by the tragedy at Virginia Tech in 2007. This recording is the premiere performance at the special Memorial Church service in April 2007.
• Corrupting early music; this palestremix was executed by Wayne Marshall after my original concept and heckling during the remix process
• Playing computer games; I am a special fan of escaping into alternate universes such as Azeroth. Level 60's impede research; level 70's even more. Someone commented on one of my characters here.
• Cooking, gardening, and eating the fruits and vegetables of my labors
• (Usually) funny poetry
• My Erdős number is 3, via two paths.
• My degree is a "Philosophiae Doctoris" in "Computationis Rationum Scientiam", a phrase Google didn't know about before I wrote it here.
• My name has some interesting characteristics:
• When I was young, I noticed an interesting anagram I will leave as a puzzle. Heinrich Christensen noticed it without prompting; Noam Elkies, upon meeting my parents, asked them if they had intentionally given me a name with this property. (I don't know whether he'd noticed it before then.) After reading this, Florin Constantin observed that “short cipher” is an anagram for Chris Thorpe, but the one I'm talking about is even more self-referential than a topic relating to my research.
• The first six letters of my first name, or my short first name and last initial make for unfortunate abbreviations:
• When I was at Microsoft, they nearly gave me the email address t-christ@microsoft.com (I got t-cthorp).
• When I joined LinkedIn, my contacts were invited to accept my invitation, decide later, or say "I don't know Christ...". Zak Stone provided a screenshot.
• Amazon.com apparently does know Christ....
• I speak English, Spanish, French, German, and Dutch well enough to have meaningful conversations, which means I can also understand Italian and read Portuguese (If you've ever heard spoken Portuguese the reason for this distinction is immediate.) I also studied Russian and Japanese and know enough Mandarin to surprise people.