Brendan A. Miller

Working on digital trust and identity infrastructure for humans and agents.

Current Work

Principal Engineer at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, working on how people and AI agents establish trust online.

• Advanced Digital Identity — I lead engineering on a user-owned identity wallet that lets people prove a specific fact (their age, an account they control, that they met someone in person) without handing over the underlying data. Our open-source reference implementation, Keyring, is built on peer-to-peer relationship credentials and a graduated model of trust. I authored the underlying Decentralized Trust Graph Credentials specification in collaboration with the Linux Foundation's Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group. The same primitives work for individuals, communities, organizations, and AI agents, seating humans and automated actors on one trust substrate.
• LLM Engine — Principal Engineer on the lab's backend for deploying LLM agents into live group conversations across Slack, Zoom, and NextSpace. The focus is agents that facilitate rather than dominate discussion, plus benchmarking how well a model actually improves a multi-person exchange. I was also a co-author of Mapping LLM Tools for Public Discourse, Pluralism & Social Cohesion (2025).

Selected Coverage

• Harvard Gazette — on the launch of the Keyring wallet and the case for user-owned identity.
• Proof Street: Trust That Scales With the Stakes — an in-depth look at Keyring's architecture, graduated trust signals, and the work of building a usable decentralized trust layer.

Elsewhere

LinkedIn / CV

Earlier Publications

From earlier work as Director of the Office of Science, Technology and Energy at the New Mexico Economic Development Department:

• New Mexico's Green Economy: Capitalizing on Assets and Opportunities (2009)
• Growing New Mexico's Clean Tech Economy: Strategies to Strengthen Technology Commercialization (2010)