Co-PI of the CCTI project at the University of Cambridge, alongside Martin Pompéry for SINE. Cambridge leads WP-A (attested-data layer) and WP-B (zkDB), and co-leads WP-D and WP-F.
Source so far: sources/proposals/2026-06-17-aria-ccti-proposal-draft-2.md
(named under clause 22.7 as principal investigator).
⟨Background: widely known as the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (O’Reilly, 2017) and for research on local-first software and CRDTs; associated with Ink & Switch, which appears here as a CCTI sub-contractor. No profile source (CV, faculty page) has been ingested — treat this paragraph as unverified. What is now on file is a primary source on his current research output, below.⟩
Research output on file ⟨added 2026-08-17⟩
Man, J. & Kleppmann, M. (2026). Emission Impossible: Cryptographically
Verifiable Carbon Emissions Reporting for Cloud Computing.
E-Energy ‘26, Banff. doi:10.1145/3744255.3811720, CC BY 4.0. First-named
author Jessica Man (Cambridge, Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar);
the acknowledgments note that Kleppmann is crowdfunding-supported.
Recursive zk-SNARKs (o1js, no trusted setup) proving per-customer emissions allocations to cloud customers without disclosure — at $0.01 per report, with a transparency log rather than a blockchain as the commitment layer. The paper’s stated long-term goal is “to work towards accurately reporting and verifying the emissions of the entire world economy.”
⟨Inference: three things this settles. First, the CCTI Co-PI’s own current work is applied verifiable sustainability reporting, not only distributed systems — which is a much closer fit to SINE’s existing sustainability-data line than the CCTI proposal alone suggested. Second, he is in working contact with Jonathan Heiss, whose paper the 2026 work advances on and who is thanked for feedback. Third, the distributed-systems lineage still shows: the design’s key move is to replace a consensus system with an append-only log and a single hash commitment — the smallest coordination primitive that does the job.⟩
Why he matters strategically
⟨Inference: the co-PI pairing is what anchors CCTI in the UK and gives SINE a Cambridge affiliation it did not previously have in this wiki. It also supplies the distributed-systems and local-first lineage that the zkDB idea sits in — a query/rule layer over heterogeneous attested facts is a database-research idea before it is a cryptography idea.⟩