T.J. Purtell : 2012 Mobile and Social Workshop

Today mobile devices know all of our friends because they are in our address books. Applications running on our devices can gain access to information about our contacts but they lack the ability to communicate with them programmatically in a uniform way. You might be able to send a Facebook message to one person or an email to another but you have no way to interact in a group across networks. ESP solves this problem by layering a communication API on top of a secure mechanism for mobile devices to prove their identity directly to one another. Applications built on ESP can communicate state changes across the ego-centric social network using whatever network channel is available. The Identity-Based Cryptography primitives allow for social software to achieve a balance between virality, data ownership, and privacy. All user data in the system is encrypted and apps can be made social without requiring a server to host user data.

T.J.Purtell is a Stanford Computer Science PhD student. He is working under the direction of Monica Lam in the Mobile and Social Computing Research Group. He received his undergraduate degree in CS from MIT in 2004. After graduating, he worked for a startup developing real-time rendering systems for novel 3D displays and subsequently a distributed desktop virtualization company where he built several OS virtualization technologies.