Brendan A. Miller

Innovating how people and AI agents establish trust and collaborate online.

About

Brendan A. Miller is a technologist with a civic mission, applying private- and public-sector experience to innovate how people and AI agents establish trust and collaborate online. He is Principal Engineer at the Applied Technology Lab at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and, jointly, at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and an editor of the Decentralized Trust Graph specifications at the Trust over IP Foundation. Previously, he served as Chief Software Architect for Fortune 500 clients and directed the Office of Science and Technology at the New Mexico Economic Development Department, where he authored state strategies for technology commercialization.

Current Work

• Advanced Digital Identity: I lead research and development on user-owned identity that enables people to form and manage their social networks and delegated agents in a verified, portable, and private manner, and prove specific facts (e.g. 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 Trust over IP Foundation's Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group. The same primitives work for individuals, communities, organizations, and AI agents, seating humans and AI agents on one trust substrate.
• LLM Engine: I am the initiator and Principal Engineer on LLM Engine, the Applied Social Media Lab's flexible service for deploying LLM agents into live group conversations across Slack, Zoom, and NextSpace. The focus is agents that facilitate and enhance discussion for users with diverse goals and needs. I was also a co-author of Mapping LLM Tools for Public Discourse, Pluralism & Social Cohesion (2025).

Selected Coverage

• Linux Foundation: The First Open Source Verifiable Trust Community — co-authored write-up of the Prague demo at Linux Plumbers and Open Source Summit EU, including Keyring with OpenVTC for verifying open source contributors and their AI agents.
• 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.

Education

• MBA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• MPA, Harvard University
• Sc.B., Mathematics-Computer Science, Brown University

Elsewhere

LinkedIn / CV

Earlier Publications

From earlier work as Director of the Office of Science and Technology 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)