Hi, I just obtained my PhD degree from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I am very grateful to have Giulia Fanti and Elaine Shi as my advisors. I am open to collaborations - just drop me an email if you have any interesting ideas or projects in mind!

Hiring! I am joining HKUST as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering starting from February 2026 and now looking for PhD students and research interns. I am looking for students who are interested in related topics including cryptography, privacy-preserving computation, security and privacy in machine learning, etc. Please feel free to reach out to me via email.

Research Interests


Cryptography, Privacy-preserving computation, Security and privacy in machine learning, Blockchain technology, etc.

I design algorithms and do implementations.

Education

I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University.

Publications

  1. Ashrujit Ghoshal,Mingxun Zhou, Elaine Shi, Bo Peng.(Randomized Author Order) Pseudorandom Functions with Weak Programming Privacy and Applications to Private Information Retrieval , Eurocrypt, 2025.

  2. Mingxun Zhou, Elaine Shi, and Giulia Fanti. Pacmann: Efficient Private Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search , ICLR, 2025.

  3. Mingxun Zhou, Elaine Shi, and Giulia Fanti. Conan: Distributed Proofs of Compliance for Anonymous Data Collection , CCS 2024

  4. Ashrujit Ghoshal, Mingxun Zhou, and Elaine Shi.(Randomized Author Order) Efficient Pre-processing PIR Without Public-Key Cryptography, Eurocrypt 2024.

  5. Mingxun Zhou, Mengshi Zhao, T-H. Hubert Chan, and Elaine Shi.(Randomized Author Order) Advanced Composition Theorems for Differential Obliviousness, ITCS 2024.

  6. Mingxun Zhou, Andrew Park, Elaine Shi and Wenting Zheng. Piano: Extremely Simple, Single-Server PIR with Sublinear Server Computation, S&P 2024.

  7. Mingxun Zhou, Elaine Shi, T-H. Hubert Chan, and Shir Maimon.(Randomized Author Order) A Theory of Composition for Differential Obliviousness, Eurocrypt 2023

  8. Mingxun Zhou, W. Lin, Yiannis Tselekounis, and Elaine Shi.(Randomized Author Order) Optimal Single-Server Private Information Retrieval, Eurocrypt 2023

  9. Mingxun Zhou*, Liyi Zeng*, Yilin Han, Peilun Li, Fan Long, Dong Zhou, Ivan Beschastnikh, and Ming Wu (*Equal Contribution). Mercury: Fast Transaction Broadcast in High Performance Blockchain System, INFOCOM 2023

  10. Mingxun Zhou, Tianhao Wang, T-H. Hubert Chan, Giulia Fanti, and Elaine Shi. Locally Differentially Private Sparse Vector Aggregation, S&P 2022.

  11. Charlie Hou*, Mingxun Zhou*, Yan Ji, Phil Daian, Florian Tramer, Giulia Fanti, and Ari Juels. (*Equal Contribution)SquirRL: Automating Attack Analysis on Blockchain Incentive Mechanisms with Deep Reinforcement Learning, NDSS 2021.[code]

  12. Minmei Wang*, Mingxun Zhou*, Shouqian Shi, and Chen Qian. (*Euqal Contribution) Vacuum Filters: More Space-Efficient and Faster Replacement for Bloom and Cuckoo Filters, VLDB 2020. [code]

Preprints/Other Projects

Presentations/Talks

Teaching

Others