Introducing: Bristena Oprisanu, Machine Learning Privacy Engineer

Hello, please introduce yourself!

Hello! My name is Bristena and I am working at Bitfount as a Machine Learning Privacy Engineer.  

What does your role as Machine Learning Privacy Engineer Bitfount involve?

I have been working at Bitfount for a year and my role so far included a mix of software development as well as looking into integrating privacy preserving technologies in our product.

How did you get into this field?

Having an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, I was passionate about cryptography, and pursued an MSc in Information Security which then led to a PhD focusing on Privacy Preserving Technologies for genomic data applications. I started working at Bitfount right after finishing my PhD. 

What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment, as we are preparing for open beta so there are several smaller tasks I’ve been working on, but recently I have added a PrivateSetIntersection protocol to our library, based on the RSA blinding private set intersection (https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/491.pdf).

How would you describe the culture and working environment?

In my time at Bitfount, I really enjoy the work environment, having a team made up of people with various skill sets and interests and I think it is definitely a big advantage to work at a company where privacy is at the core of our product, not built as an afterthought. 

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