Serene (pianist)

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Serene is an American classical concert pianist [1] and technologist who created the Snowflake transport mechanism which was used heavily by Tor. [2] Serene is also known for combining music and technology, such as programming and performing alongside musical robots. [3]

Contents

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, [4] 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, [5] [6] 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. [7] Snowflake came to prominence when the Tor network began using it to prevent hostile actors from blocking access to Tor. [8] [9] [10]

Serene is an advisory board member of the World Ethical Data Foundation. [11]

Career as a musician

As of 2021, SERENE is a Bösendorfer Artist, the sole non-conservatory pianist with such an affiliation. [12] She presented her Bösendorfer debut with the symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus. [13] She has performed with Grimes, using EEG and generative AI music technology. [14]

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.[ citation needed ] 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. [15] [16] [17] She also has collaborated with Blue Man Group founder Chris Wink on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15.

In 2024, Serene premiered a piano robotics concert at a fusion energy facility while improvising with Jaron Lanier. [3]

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. 1 2 Lanier, Jaron. "Inside a Fusion Startup's Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony". WIRED. Archived from the original on 10 December 2024. Retrieved 22 February 2025.
  4. ↑ Bratton, Benjamin H. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p. 592. ISBN   978-0-262-02957-5.
  5. ↑ McDevitt, Dan (18 March 2017). "Information Controls Fellows Reflect On Their ICFP Experience". Open Technology Fund. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
  6. ↑ "Wie eine Ex-Google-Ingenieurin dabei hilft, Internet-Zensur zu umgehen". futurezone.at (in German). 12 February 2023. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  7. ↑ Shu, Catherine (19 July 2023). "Snowstorm raises seed to keep the internet free". TechCrunch. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
  8. ↑ Castro, Chiara (1 March 2023). "Snowstorm: the bridge to reconnect a splintering web". TechRadar. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
  9. ↑ 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.
  10. ↑ Newman, Jared (8 February 2023). "Snowstorm is a censorship-blocking VPN that might actually work". Fast Company. Retrieved 15 February 2023.
  11. ↑ Moreno, Johan. "As The Internet Freedom Project Expands, Snowflake Becomes Snowstorm". Forbes. Retrieved 10 September 2023.
  12. ↑ "Serene". Boesendorfer.
  13. ↑ Nachrichten, Salzburger (22 May 2023). "Vom Computer ans Klavier: Pianistin Serene im Konzerthaus". Salzburger Nachrichten (in German). Retrieved 10 September 2023.
  14. ↑ "Features: 9 women in cybersecurity you may not know but you should follow in 2024". Tech Radar. 8 March 2024.
  15. ↑ "Pianist Brings Innovation, Master Class in Instrumental Expression to Groton". Groton. 9 November 2021. Retrieved 22 December 2021.
  16. ↑ "Pianist Serene Performs Virtually at Groton School". Groton Herald. 2 November 2021. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  17. ↑ Millstein, Lincoln (17 January 2023). "Self-taught pianist Serene to perform at Grace Farms". CT Insider.
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