During 2025, Mako can be reached at Mako.Bates@uvm.edu.
On Github he is ShapeOfMatter.
Academic¶
Mako Bates defended his dissertation,
on particular techniques for choreographic programming,
in June of 2025,
and is continuing to work with the UVM team as a postdoc through the fall.
During his PhD, he also worked on secure multi-party computation, differential privacy systems, and language design.
University of Vermont
Ph.D. in Computer Science
2020 – 2025
University of Southern Maine
Bachelor’s in Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering and Sociology
2010 – 2014
Links¶
Efficient, Portable, Census-Polymorphic Choreographic Programming.
with Shun Kashiwa, Syed Jafri, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper, and Joseph Near,
presented at PLDI25.
proceedings version
author version
- Cutting edge contributions to the theory and implementation of library-level choreographic programming.
- Formalized and implemented novel techniques for programming concurrent protocols.
- Led a team of six researchers in coalescing related findings into a coherent paper.
MultiChor: Type-safe and efficient choreographies with location-set polymorphism.
The Haskell package from the above paper, available on Hackage.
SoK: Usability Studies in Differential Privacy.
Onyinye Dibia, Prianka Bhattacharjee, Brad Stenger, Steven Baldasty, Mako Bates, Ivoline Ngong, Yuanyuan Feng, and Joseph Near,
Published in PoPETs 2025
- A Systematization-of-Knowledge paper on the usability of, and communication about, differential privacy.
- Synthesizes insights from studies on both the practical use of DP tools
and strategies for communicating to practitioners and end-users about DP parameters.
We Know I Know You Know; Choreographic Programming With Multicast and Multiply Located Values.
CP24 Workshop, 2024, Copenhagen.
YouTube
DT-SIM: Property-Based Testing for MPC Security.
with Joe Near,
under review by Digital Threats: Research and Practice.
[pre-print]
Demonstrates that property-based testing can be effective for detecting security bugs in secure protocols.
Industry¶
He put the 402-Receipts Standard on indefinite hiatus in 2019.
Of that work, the piece mostly likely to still be of any use is the RSA Blind Signature implementation.
Mako built a deep understanding of php and python during his six years of industry work; this inspired his decision to return to academia.
Blackhawk Network
Senior Developer, 2020-2020
- Backend engineer in a large network of teams maintaining a family of late-startup-scale Django apps.
- Introduced and implemented Mypy static type analysis on new and existing repositories.
- Added to and simplified the team’s use of Django middle-ware patterns.
Irving Street Functionality LLC
Consultant, 2019-2020
- Helped clients understand the costs and benefits of different tech stacks.
- Researched and advised on the utility of different cryptocurrency systems.
- Designed and built e-commerce, customer-outreach, and inventory-searching tools for a small retailer with low technical expertise.
The Direct Monetization Network
Founder, 2018 – 2019
- Designed a standardized web protocol for low-interaction paywalls on any tech-stack.
- Published open-source C++ implementation of core cryptographic protocol.
- Built proof-of-concept Notary app in Haskell (Scotty, hasql, PostgreSQL).
Tilson Technology Management
Lead Engineer, 2015 – 2019
- Full stack engineer responsible for design, development, QA/QC and maintenance of a high traffic e-commerce web application in AWS.
- Managed the migration from a single persistent designated server
to a load-balanced, auto-deployed, auto-scaling AWS setup with CDN and other peripherals.
- Updated database schema and settings to meet performance requirements.
- Built server-initialization scripts and transaction-report utilities in Python and Bash.
- Managed the migration from PHP-5.3 to 7.2.
- Monitored and addressed performance, reliability, and security issues.
- Designed and built asynchronous-processing systems and other site peripherals.
- Built integrations with mobile and set-top apps to provide a cross-device UX.
- Built integrations with 10+ third-party service providers.
Ecolab
Software Developer, 2014 – 2015
- Full-stack iterative development of an existing enterprise C# .NET application.
- Added functionality to an expert-system resource-scheduling system with reporting, asynchronous data processing, SAP ERP integrations,
and a JS front-end.
- Participated in systematic automated testing, unit-testing, manual testing and code review.