About
Some information about myself
I’m Rob Helmer, a software engineer with 20 years of experience building impactful projects and solving complex problems with code. I’m passionate about creating innovative solutions and sharing my expertise with others, while continuing to grow and learn in my journey as a developer.
Work
I’ve worked with a variety of technologies and tools to build robust systems. Here are some of the companies I’ve worked for.
Research
I’ve collaborated with academic institutions on projects involving privacy-preserving systems and large-scale data analysis.
Collaborator
Paper: Rally and WebScience: A Platform and Toolkit for Browser-Based Research on Technology and Society Problems
Author(s): Researchers at Princeton University
Published in: Princeton University
Developed core software components for Rally, enabling large-scale, privacy-conscious browser-based research. Contributed to Mozilla's implementation, supporting studies analyzing 4.4M webpage visits from 1,817 participants.
Collaborator
Paper: Protecting Privacy by Splitting Trust, a dissertation
Author(s): Henry Corrigan-Gibbs
Published in: MIT CSAIL
Contributed to libprio, a privacy-preserving aggregation library in C, and integrated it into Firefox. Acknowledged in the doctoral dissertation.
Contributor
Paper: Testing Privacy-Preserving Telemetry with Prio
Author(s): Researchers at Mozilla
Published in: Mozilla
This blog post has been widely cited in numerous papers for its contributions to privacy-preserving telemetry and Prio integration in Mozilla products.
Acknowledged
Paper: Federated Learning for Ranking Browser History Suggestions
Author(s): Researchers at Mozilla
Published in: Mozilla
Contributed to the client-side Firefox parts of federated learning experiments.
Acknowledged
Paper: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Traditional Information Retrieval in Crash Report Deduplication
Author(s): Researchers at University of Alberta
Published in: University of Alberta
Acknowledged for making Mozilla’s massive collection of crash stack reports publicly available, enabling open research and data access.