Aaron Mac Sween
Aaron MacSween is a Research Engineer at XWiki SAS.
He studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of
Toronto, meanwhile devoting much of his free time to a global community
of cryptography and distributed computing enthusiasts.
He acted as a volunteer system administrator at CASA (the Cognitive
science and Artificial intelligence Student’s Association), refurbishing
non-functional computers and turning the association into a part-time
Linux User Group. This activity expanded into an effort to construct an
encrypted mesh network across more of the city, a project which has
since grown, and led to him being featured in Vice Magazine’s
Motherboard.
After two years he left school to work as a web developer, the
flexibility of which afforded him more time to help members of the
cryptography community organize their efforts. In 2015, his involvement
in this role brought him to Maribor, Slovenia to lecture at BattleMesh
v8 on the topic of “Peer to Peer IPv6 Networking in cjdns”. He moved to
Paris, France later the same year.
His time at XWiki is spent developing technologies for Collaborative
Real Time Editing in the browser, a task which allows him to leverage
his background in Cognitive Science to make cryptography and distributed
computing accessible to a wider audience.