Oakland, USA
Karissa McKelvey
Director of Engineering, Code for Science and Society
Karissa is Director of Engineering at Code for Science and Society, a non-profit supporting public data and technology through software development, education, and outreach. Formerly a research scientist at Indiana University, her work studying online political communication resulted in multiple peer-reviewed papers and press in outlets such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal. She has successfully led data-focused teams to success with diverse projects throughout her career in academia, non-profits, and industry. She spends her spare time advancing computer science education, playing her trumpet, and volunteering at social good non-profits.
Data Stored Everywhere and Nowhere - Building Applications on the Distributed Web
In the past few years, peer-to-peer distributed infrastructure has become more viable in Node.js. WebTorrent, for example, opened up the possibility for streaming BitTorrent files in the browser, where every person who watched a video would be contributing a piece of their bandwidth to improve speed for everyone else watching the video. However, this kind of technology goes far beyond streaming videos. In this talk, I introduce Dat, a peer-to-peer data sharing protocol that updates data over time. This means that we can build websites, applications, and collaborate on documents in a way that is resilient against censorship and Internet shutdown. Audience members will be able to understand the Dat protocol, how it works, and how to build a website using Dat.