Jens Jelitto

Jens Jelitto is a Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research-Zurich where he is currently working on designing and building decentralized identity systems centered around self-sovereign identity concepts. Recent focus areas include:

• Design and implementation of a solution for a national credential issuance organization to create and verify digital credentials (based on W3C) allowing the cryptographic binding of credentials to a holder while preserving their privacy and minimizing correlation capabilities. This work also includes a new privacy-preserving solution for the selective presentation of credential attributes to a verifier.
• Introduction of selective presentation of credentials in a mobile wallet, targeting the extension of IBM offerings around digital credentials.
• Active engagement in the standardization of verifiable credentials in Hyperledger AnonCreds
• Collaboration with ETH Zurich and other partners to investigate and drive the usage of decentralized identity and verifiable credential concepts for life-long learning at educational institutions
• Development of a universal DID resolver driver for the IBM Digital Health Pass
• Main programming languages used: Typescript, Java, Rust, Go

Before, Jens has worked on the application of Blockchain technologies for several industries with focus on its application in the world of IoT. Key activities include:

• Linking the physical world with the digital world in a trusted way using Blockchain combined with
  • Crypto anchor technologies and crypto anchor platform to create an interoperable way to securely connect products to supply chain and traceability solutions.
  • Blockchain enabled lightweight IoT devices to communicate in a secure and trusted way to a blockchain backend.
• Blockchain for pharma supply chain solution to fight counterfeit and enable end-to-end traceability of serialized medicine

Jens has also worked on Technical Strategy & Planning at the IBM Research-Zurich laboratory as Technical Assistant to Alessandro Curioni, IBM Fellow, VP Europe and Director IBM Research-Zurich.

He served as Manager of research teams in the areas of 'Storage Techniques for Big Data' and 'Tape Technologies' at IBM Research - Zurich that he joined as a research staff member in 2001. He has worked in the fields of digital signal processing for wireless LANs and for magnetic recording, especially on advanced signal processing techniques for the tape read channels and on servo control aspects to improve the storage capacity and reliability of tape systems, as well as on techniques for Big Data storage systems.

He received the M.Sc./Dipl.-Ing. and PhD. degrees from the Dresden University of Technology, Germany, in 1995 and 2001, respectively. After his diploma, he worked in the field of speech recognition. In July 1996, he joined the Mannesmann Mobilfunk Chair for Mobile Communications Systems at Dresden University of Technology, where his main research interests included digital signal processing, smart antennas and spatial dimension reduction problems.

Jens is Senior Member of the IEEE. He holds about 60 patents and was a co-recipient of the 2011 IBM Research Pat Goldberg Memorial paper award. He received a 2009 IBM Research Extraordinary Technical Accomplishment for his contributions to 'Technologies for Linear Tape Open and Enterprise Tape products' and an IBM Corporate Award for 'Tape Technology Leadership' in 2013. He was also a co-recipient of the IFAC Industrial Achievement Award “For the application of advanced control technologies in the nano-domain to magnetic tape data storage” in 2014.