Serene is an American classical concert pianist[1] and technologist who created the Snowflake transport mechanism which was used heavily by Tor.[2]

Early life and education

Serene is ethnically Chinese and spent her childhood in a variety of regions within North America.[1] She attended Carnegie Mellon University, graduating with a degree in computer science[1] in 2012.

Career in software

She worked as the first engineer for technology incubator Google Ideas,[3] now Jigsaw LLC. While a senior fellow at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she was a recipient of the Open Technology Fund’s Information Controls Fellowship, where she created Snowflake,[4][5] a pluggable transport enabling censorship circumvention for The Tor Project as its first use-case.

She is the founder of Snowstorm, the rearchitected V2 and commercialization of the Snowflake transport technology. In July 2023, Snowstorm finished its seed round of $3 million.[6] Snowflake came to prominence when the Tor network began using it to prevent hostile actors from blocking access to Tor.[7][8][9]

Serene is an advisory board member of the World Ethical Data Foundation.[10]

Career as a musician

As of 2021, SERENE is a Bösendorfer Artist, the sole non-conservatory pianist with such an affiliation.[11] She presented her Bösendorfer debut with the symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus.[12]

Serene has given performances at both concert halls and such non-traditional settings as San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and inside a decommissioned Boeing 747 at Burning Man. She received a composition credit on Kanye West’s opera Mary (2019).[1] She has released two EPs: Unraveling (2019), a collection of piano works by Maurice Ravel, and Rachmaninoff Concert No. 3 (2020). She has written code to project abstract, moving visualizations behind her performances.[13][14][15] She also has collaborated with Blue Man Group founder Chris Wink on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Serene". Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Musicians. 3 May 2021. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
  2. ↑ Küchemann, Fridtjof. "Zugang für Iraner: Per Snowflake ins TOR-Netzwerk". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  3. ↑ Bratton, Benjamin H. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p. 592. ISBN 978-0-262-02957-5.
  4. ↑ McDevitt, Dan (18 March 2017). "Information Controls Fellows Reflect On Their ICFP Experience". Open Technology Fund. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
  5. ↑ "Wie eine Ex-Google-Ingenieurin dabei hilft, Internet-Zensur zu umgehen". futurezone.at (in German). 12 February 2023. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  6. ↑ Shu, Catherine (19 July 2023). "Snowstorm raises seed to keep the internet free". TechCrunch. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
  7. ↑ Castro, Chiara (1 March 2023). "Snowstorm: the bridge to reconnect a splintering web". TechRadar. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
  8. ↑ Binder, Matt (10 February 2023). "Snowflake helped Tor users thwart Russian censorship. Now the VPN is branching out as Snowstorm". Mashable. Retrieved 15 February 2023.
  9. ↑ Newman, Jared (8 February 2023). "Snowstorm is a censorship-blocking VPN that might actually work". Fast Company. Retrieved 15 February 2023.
  10. ↑ Moreno, Johan. "As The Internet Freedom Project Expands, Snowflake Becomes Snowstorm". Forbes. Retrieved 10 September 2023.
  11. ↑ "Serene". Boesendorfer.
  12. ↑ Nachrichten, Salzburger (22 May 2023). "Vom Computer ans Klavier: Pianistin Serene im Konzerthaus". Salzburger Nachrichten (in German). Retrieved 10 September 2023.
  13. ↑ "Pianist Brings Innovation, Master Class in Instrumental Expression to Groton". Groton. 9 November 2021. Retrieved 22 December 2021.
  14. ↑ "Pianist Serene Performs Virtually at Groton School". Groton Herald. 2 November 2021. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  15. ↑ Millstein, Lincoln (17 January 2023). "Self-taught pianist Serene to perform at Grace Farms". CT Insider.
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