I work at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and decentralized identity systems as freelance consultant. Have written and continue to write seminal white papers on decentralized identity, reputation AI, distributed computing, and machine learning. Actively shaping the underlying standards for decentralized identity and driving their adoption. I received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1991 and then spent 10 years at Florida Atlantic University, reaching full professor status before retiring to become an entrepreneur and consultant. Have over 100 refereed publications in the areas of machine learning, autonomous vehicle systems, automated reasoning, and decentralized systems. Was principal investigator on numerous federally funded research projects. I am an active participant in open standards development and more specifically is the originator of KERI. I was recently elected to serve as volunteer Chairman of the BoT of the Sovrin Foundation.

I have been devoting a significant amount of my time (unpaid) in developing the KERI protocol under the aegis of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. KERI is the first truly secure and portable decentralized identity framework that is also compatible with the emerging W3C DID standard. What is unique about KERI is that, unlike every other DID framework, KERI is ledger agnostic. Thus it provides for the first time truly self-sovereign identifiers in the broadest sense of the word.

Your sponsorship is important as it would enable me to spend more of my time on KERI and thereby accelerate its development. I am building the Python reference implementation of KERI. My work servers as a guide to two other development teams that are building a NodeJS Javascript and Rust implementations. The faster I go that faster they go. All the funds will go to pay for a portion of my time spent developing the open source (Apache2) core libraries for KERI.

KERI whitepaper which I also wrote on my own time and contributed it to the standard effort may be found here.
https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepapers/KERI_WP_2.x.web.pdf

KERI will also have a chapter dedicated to it in an upcoming Manning book on decentralized identity.