Mark S. Miller


Mark S. Miller is an American computer scientist. He is known for his work as one of the participants in the 1979 hypertext project known as Project Xanadu; for inventing Miller columns; as the co-creator of the Agoric Paradigm of market-based distributed secure computing; and the open-source coordinator of the E programming language. He also designed the Caja programming language. Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foresight Institute
Miller earned a BS in computer science from Yale in 1980 and published his Johns Hopkins PhD thesis in 2006. He is currently Chief Scientist at Agoric and a member of the ECMAScript committee.. Previous positions include Chief Architect with the Virus-Safe Computing Initiative at HP Labs, and research scientist at Google
Miller's research has focused on language design for secure open systems. At Xerox PARC, he worked on Concurrent Logic Programming systems and Agoric Open Systems. At Sun Labs, he led the development of WebMart, a framework for buying and selling computing resources across the network. At HP Labs he was the architect for the Virus Safe Computing project. While at Google he developed Caja, an environment for secure execution in JavaScript. He has also written articles and given talks on dealing with risks from future technologies.
Miller has been pursuing a stated goal of enabling cooperation between untrusting partners. Miller sees this as a fundamental feature required to power economic interactions, and the main piece that has been missing in the toolkit available to software developers. Miller has returned to this issue repeatedly since the Agoric Open Systems Papers from 1988
Miller's most prominent contributions have been in the area of programming language design, most notably,
the E Language, which demonstrated language-based secure distributed computing. The work inspired several adaptations to other programming paradigms. Also was instrumental on the EcmaScript standards committee in providing the foundations for development of Secure EcmaScript, a standards track evolution that will make full capability programming available in JavaScript.
Miller's work has been written up in Wired which described his work as the inspiration for Michael Stonebraker's Mariposa, developed at Berkeley.

Major publications