..@..♦.D.	About	Blog	Recipes
About me — Things I do — Contact Version française

Hello!

My name is Damien Desfontaines — also known as Ted, or any pseudonym recognized by the Ted(Ted)* regular expression — and this is the sober version of my personal webpage. The fancier one, which is now quite outdated, can be found right here.

About me

I have two jobs:

• I'm a privacy software engineer for Google, in Zürich.
• I'm a PhD student at the ETH Zürich, in the Information Security Group. My supervisor is David Basin.

I studied at the École normale supérieure, where I completed a Master's degree in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science called the LMFI. Before that, I did the first year of the MPRI, a theoretical computer science master.

I used to work on pretty theoretical stuff: I spent two research internships studying approximations of the halting problem. First, I published two papers that seemed to indicate that this was a solvable problem (1 (PDF) 2 (PDF)), then two others that show that it is in fact impossible (short version, unfortunately not in open access, full version (PDF)).

Currently, both on my PhD time and on my engineering time, I'm working on large-scale data anonymization and reidentifiability risk analysis. Put more simply, I'm trying to make it easy to protect and de-identify your personal data =)

You can find my (outdated) curriculum vitae right here, along with my (less outdated) LinkedIn profile. Oh, and I'm @TedOnPrivacy on Twitter.

Things I like, things I do

• I love to cook! Here are some marvelous recipes I have tested for you (in French).
• I like tabletop role-playing games, and I sometimes play or DM on Dungeons & Dragons. I co-wrote an experimental NPC generator for Paizo Pathfinder RPG.
• When I have some free time, I sometimes write alexandrines. If you like poetry and speak French, you may have fun reading our version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (in French).
• I used to work as an oral examiner in mathematics, in the French high school Louis-le-Grand. I love complicated math problems, especially when they can be solved using only elementary results. Here are some of my favourites (in French).
• I love simple programming languages that make it easy not to shoot yourself in the foot, for example Go or OCaml.
• I listen to music all the time. I like trip-hop, ska, symphonic metal, jazz, electro, classical music, hip-hop, mixes of everything, and it is really hard for me to stop this list without adding dozens of other links to wonderful artists' websites.
• I like to ski and to admire snowy mountains when winter is coming.

Contact

To get in touch with me, you can send an e-mail to the adress se.niatnofsed@neimad (beware when copying it).

If you prefer instant messaging, I am usually connected to the irc.ulminfo.fr IRC server, with "Ted" as an alias. I also use WhatsApp and Signal, feel free to ask me for my number if that's your favorite communication method.

And if you are a hipster fan of old-school letters, you can use my office address (and send me postcards ♥):
    Damien Desfontaines
    Brandschenkestrasse 110
    8002 ZÜRICH
    SWITZERLAND
or ask me directly for my personal address.