Joann Q. Chen, PH.D.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at San Diego State University (SDSU). Before joining SDSU, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine, under the supervision of Prof. Zhou Li. My research interests center around Differential Privacy (DP), privacy-enhancing technologies, and privacy in machine learning. I have experience in working on differentially private DNS resolution, DP for data stream release, differentially private resource allocator, and quantifying privacy risks in machine learning. I served in a leadership role at the Society of Graduate Electrical Engineers and Computer Scientists (GEECS) at UC Irvine.

 

*Student Opportunity* I am looking for students at all levels who are interested in privacy innovation research. If you are a current or prospective student at SDSU, or if you are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. through UC Irvine‘s Computational Science Joint Doctoral Program or UC San Diego‘s Engineering Joint Doctoral Program, please e-mail me with your resume and research interests.  

See Lab Website for more info. 

Publications

A Comprehensive Study of Privacy Risks in Curriculum Learning. Accepted by the 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), July 2025.
Joann Qiongna Chen
, Xinlei He, Zheng Li, Yang Zhang, Zhou Li. 

NetDPSyn: Synthesizing Network Traces under Differential Privacy. Accepted by the 24th ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), November 2024.
Danyu Sun, Joann Qiongna Chen, Chen Gong, Tianhao Wang, Zhou Li.

Differentially Private Resource Allocator. Accepted by the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), December 2023. & Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) Workshop, 2023.
Joann Qiongna Chen, Tianhao Wang, Zhikun Zhang, Yang Zhang, Somesh Jha, Zhou Li. 

Hide and Seek: Revisiting DNS-based User Tracking. Accepted by 7th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), June 2022.
Deliang Chang*, Joann Qiongna Chen*, Zhou Li, Xing Li.  

Continuous Release of Data Streams under both Centralized and Local Differential Privacy. Accepted by the 28th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Virtual, November 2021.
Tianhao Wang, Joann Qiongna Chen, Zhikun Zhang, Dong Su, Yueqiang Cheng, Zhou Li, Ninghui Li, Somesh Jha. 

From WHOIS to WHOWAS: A Large-Scale Measurement Study of Domain Registration Privacy under the GDPR. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), Virtual, February 2021.
Baojun Liu, Chaoyi Lu, Yiming Zhang, Zhou Li, Fenglu Zhang, Haixin Duan, Ying Liu, Joann Qiongna Chen, Jinjin Liang, Zaifeng Zhang, Shuang Hao, Min Yang. 

Splitting Algorithm of Valuation Algebra and Its Application in Automaton Representation of Semiring Valued Constraint Problems. Quantitative Logic and Soft Computing 2016 Springer, Cham, 2017. 203-212.
Bang-He Han, Yong-Ming Li, Joann Qiongna Chen

*First two authors contributed equally to this work.

Professional Experience

Meta Reality Labs Research                                                                                                09/2022 – 01/2023
Part-time Student Researcher (Advisor: Deeksha Dangwal)

Meta Reality Labs Research                                                                                               06/2022 – 06/2022
Research Scientist Intern (Advisor: Deeksha Dangwal)

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security                                                         07/2021 – 09/2021
Research Intern (Advisor: Yang Zhang)

Talks/ Presentations

Differentially Private Resource Allocator                                                                                          12/2023
The 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)

Differentially Private Resource Allocator                                                                                          03/2022
Microsoft Research Redmond Cryptography and Privacy Colloquium

Continuous Release of Data Streams under both Centralized and Local Differential Privacy
The 28th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)                                
11/2021

SERVICE

Program Committee
USENIX Security 2025
WPES 2024
TPDP 2024