Dr. Martin Kleppmann

Volkswagen Foundation – Freigeist Fellowship

Local-first software: resilient and secure collaboration
Chair for Decentralised Systems Engineering

Academic Career and Research Areas

Dr. Kleppmann (b. 1983) works at the intersection of distributed systems, security protocols, and database systems. His current focus is on decentralised collaboration and local-first software. In contrast to cloud-based collaboration software such as Google Docs, local-first software continues working if the company that made the software shuts down or if a user is locked out of their account. The local-first paradigm puts users in control of their own data and also enables better security and privacy through the use of end-to-end encryption.

After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Kleppmann went into industry and co-founded two internet startups, one of which was acquired by LinkedIn. Drawing on his experience building scalable data systems in Silicon Valley, he wrote the bestselling book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” for O’Reilly. In 2015 he returned to Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD and was awarded a Leverhulme Trust research fellowship. In 2022 he received a Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Fellowship and moved to TUM.

    Matthew Weidner, Martin Kleppmann, Daniel Hugenroth, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees”. ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2021.

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    Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, Victor B. F. Gomes, and Alastair R. Beresford: “A highly-available move operation for replicated trees”. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 33(7):1711–1724, October 2021.

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    Victor B. F. Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems”. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL), Vol. 1, OOPSLA, Article 109, October 2017.

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    Martin Kleppmann and Alastair R. Beresford: “A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype”. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 28(10):2733–2746, April 2017.

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    Martin Kleppmann: “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”. O’Reilly Media, March 2017. ISBN: 1449373321,

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