Paul Byers Trevithick (born 1959) is currently a client partner and senior director at EPAM, advisor to early-stage startups, technologist, privacy advocate, and entrepreneur.

Education

He grew up in Ottawa, Canada, attended

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, and received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in electrical engineering and computer science in 1981 and was a research assistant at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

in 1981 and 1982.

Career

In 1981, he co-founded Lightspeed Computers which was ultimately acquired by DuPont. He was CEO and co-founder in 1985 of Archetype, Inc. which became the Pageflex division of Bitstream Inc. in April 1997. Trevithick then served as Bitstream's vice president of marketing, and starting in August 1998 its president. Trevithick has contributed to

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working ...

, PODI,

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS; ) is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), ...

(OASIS), and ITU-T standards efforts. He was granted the Seybold Industry Vision award in 1999. Trevithick led the development of the Experimental Laboratory for Investigating Collaboration, Information-sharing, and Trust (ELICIT) web-based platform under contract to the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...

(OASD/NII) Command and Control Research Program (CCRP). ELICIT is a tool used in social science research. He joined EPAM in Dec 2013 and is currently a client partner and senior director.

Work on information privacy and personal data

From 2003 to 2009, Trevithick worked on open source identity software for

Internet security Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules ...

, and privacy for digital identities and social networks on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. He co-authored a paper on "Identity and Resilience" that was one of the 100 papers cited as informing the 2009 US White House CyberPolicy Review. He initiated and co-led what became the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization suppo ...

Higgins project Higgins is an open-source project dedicated to giving individuals more control over their personal identity, profile and social network data. The project is organized into three main areas: #Active Clients - An active client integrates with a b ...

. Supporting this effort, he co-founded the SocialPhysics project in collaboration with the

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...

and co-founded the IdentityGang, now a part of Identity Commons. In 2008 Trevithick founded the Information Card Foundation and served as its chair. In 2009 he co-founded and was a co-chair of the Kantara Initiative Universal Login User Experience Working Group. Trevithick is a past member of the Kantara Leadership Council and a steward of Identity Commons. In 2009, Trevithick founded Azigo and was until 2020 its chairman. His most recent article on personal data is ''User-exclusive Data''. In 2021 he founded The Mee Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to giving internet users more control over their personal data and thereby increased privacy, convenience, autonomy and protection as they interact with service providers.

Footnotes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trevithick, Paul 1959 births Living people People from Winston-Salem, North Carolina 21st-century American engineers American chief executives American chief technology officers American chief operating officers MIT School of Engineering alumni