Mingxun Zhou (周铭洵)

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!

Research Interests

I am interested in {efficiency, safety, privacy} x {information retrieval, data aggregation, AI/ML, etc}.

I design algorithms and do implementations.

Education

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

Research Papers

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

• Mingxun Zhou, and Elaine Shi. The Power of the Differentially Oblivious Shuffle in Distributed Privacy Mechanisms, 2022.

• VRecon: An Efficient Set Reconciliation Algorithm, Bachelor Thesis, 2021.

Presentations/Talks

• "Advanced Composition Theorems for Differential Obliviousness" at ITCS, Jan. 2024 [video]

• "Recent Progress in Private Information Retrieval" at PKU, Jul. 2023 [video(中文视频)]

• "Piano: Extremely Simple, Single-Server PIR with Sublinear Server Computation" at CMU Crypto Seminar, May 2023 [video]

• "A Theory of Composition for Differential Obliviousness" at Eurocrypt, Apr 2023 [video]

• "Optimal Single-Server Private Information Retrieval" at CMU Theory Lunch, Sep. 2022 [video]

• "The Power of the Differentially Oblivious Shuffle in Distributed Privacy Mechanisms" at the Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing, Jun. 2022 [video]

• "Locally Differentially Private Sparse Vector Aggregation" at IEEE S&P, May 2022 [video]

• "SquirRL: Automating Attack Analysis on Blockchain Incentive Mechanisms with Deep Reinforcement Learning" at IJTCS, Aug. 2020 [video]

Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, CMU 18734/17731: Foundation of Privacy, Fall 2024
• Teaching Assistant, CMU 15893: Special Topics in Cryptography (PIR, ORAM, ZK), Spring 2024

Others

• If you find difficulty pronouncing my name, it is similar to "Ming-Shwin Joel" :)