I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, in the Department of Computer Science.

I earned my PhD from Purdue University and my Bachelor's degree from Fudan University. My research focuses on making differential privacy and machine learning privacy practical, reliable, and impactful in real-world systems.

Research Mission

Bridge theory and practice for privacy-preserving AI and data analytics.

Core Interests

Differential privacy, privacy accounting, synthetic data, and trustworthy machine learning.

Collaboration

I welcome collaborations across academia and industry on principled, deployable privacy technologies.

Selected Projects

DP Advisor

Open Tool

A custom GPT designed to help users evaluate whether differential privacy is appropriate for their use case and avoid common pitfalls. The tool does not collect personal information.

For critical decision-making settings, please consult with a human expert. Prompt and design details are available upon request via email.

PrivSyn

Visit Website

An interactive demo that walks users through generating synthetic tabular data with differential privacy guarantees.

Currently tested on the Adult dataset. Availability may vary due to free-tier cloud hosting constraints.

Personal

My wife, Xuejun Zhao, is an Assistant Professor in Information Systems and Operations Management at UNC Charlotte.

Last updated: Aug 22, 2025