Joe Near

He/him
Assistant Professor
University of Vermont
Office: E458 Innovation Hall
E-mail: jnear at uvm dot edu
[ CV ]

[ Books | Teaching | Students | Publications ]

• Member, UVM PLAID lab
• Member, UVM Center for Computer Security and Privacy

Research Interests

My research interests include data privacy (especially differential privacy), security (especially secure/verified computation), fairness, programming languages, and machine learning.

Programming Differential Privacy A book about differential privacy, for programmers. By Joseph P. Near and Chiké Abuah

Current

• UVM CS 211: Data Privacy (Fall 2021)

Previous

• UVM CS 211: Data Privacy (Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020)

• UVM CS 295: Secure Distributed Computation (Fall 2020)

• UVM CS 202: Compiler Construction (Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021)

• 294-116: Secure and Intelligent Programming. (Co-instructor; UC Berkeley, Fall 2015)

PhD

• Craig Agricola

• Mako Bates

• Tim Stevens (co-advised with Christian Skalka)

• Ryan Estes

• Krystal Maughan

• Chike Abuah

Masters

• Kristin Mills (2019; now at Dealer.com)

Undergraduate

• Vanessa White

• Zachary Ward

• Alex Silence

• Phillip Nguyen (2019; now MS student at UVM)

• Tim Stevens (2018; now PhD student at UVM)

• DDUO: General-Purpose Dynamic Analysis for Differential Privacy.
  Chike Abuah, Alex Silence, David Darais, Joseph P. Near.
  In Computer Security Foundations (CSF), 2021. (pdf)

• PrivFramework: A System for Configurable and Automated Privacy Policy Compliance
  Usmann Khan, Lun Wang, Jithendaraa Subramanian, Joseph P Near, and Dawn Song.
  In NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Dataset Security and Curation, 2020. (pdf)

• Towards Auditability for Fairness in Deep Learning
  Ivoline Ngong, Krystal Maughan, and Joseph P Near.
  In NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Causality and Interpretability, 2020. (pdf)

• DuetSGX: Differential Privacy with Secure Hardware
  Phillip Nguyen, Alex Silence, David Darais, and Joseph P. Near.
  In Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP), 2020. (pdf)

• Towards a Measure of Individual Fairness for Deep Learning
  Krystal Maughan and Joseph P. Near.
  In Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG), 2020. (pdf)

• Chorus: a Programming Framework for Building Scalable Differential Privacy Mechanisms.
  Noah Johnson, Joseph P. Near, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Dawn Song.
  In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE European Symposium on Security & Privacy (EuroS&P), 2020. (pdf)

• Duet: An Expressive Higher-Order Language and Linear Type System for Statically Enforcing Differential Privacy.
  Joseph P. Near, David Darais, Chike Abuah, Tim Stevens, Pranav Gaddamadugu, Lun Wang, Neel Somani, Mu Zhang, Nikhil Sharma, Alex Shan, and Dawn Song.
  In Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). 2019. (pdf) Distinguished paper award.
  Download implementation here

• Data Capsule: A New Paradigm for Automatic Compliance of Data Privacy Regulations.
  Lun Wang, Joseph P. Near, Neel Somani, Peng Gao, Andrew Low, David Dao, and Dawn Song.
  In POLY19 Workshop @ VLDB2019. 2019. (pdf)

• Towards Practical Differentially Private Convex Optimization.
  Roger Iyengar, Joseph P. Near, Dawn Song, Om Thakkar, Abhradeep Thakurta, Lun Wang.
  In Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2019. (pdf)

• Chorus: Differential Privacy via Query Rewriting.
  Noah Johnson, Joseph P. Near, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Dawn Song.
  CoRR, abs/1809.07750, 2018.

• Towards practical differential privacy for SQL queries.
  Noah Johnson, Joseph P. Near, and Dawn Song.
  In Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2018.

• Towards practical differential privacy for SQL queries.
  Noah Johnson, Joseph P. Near, and Dawn Song.
  CoRR, abs/1706.09479, 2017.

• Alloy*: a general-purpose higher-order relational constraint solver.
  Aleksandar Milicevic, Joseph P. Near, Eunsuk Kang, and Daniel Jackson.
  Formal Methods in System Design, Jan 2017.

• Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns.
  Joseph P. Near and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 38th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2016. (pdf)

• Alloy*: A general-purpose higher-order relational constraint solver.
  Aleksandar Milicevic, Joseph P. Near, Eunsuk Kang, and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 37th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2015.
  Distinguished paper award. (pdf)

• Finding Security Bugs in Web Applications using Domain-Specific Static Analysis.
  Joseph P. Near.
  MIT PhD Thesis, 2015.

• Derailer: Interactive Security Analysis for Web Applications.
  Joseph P. Near and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2014. (pdf)

• Alloy*: A higher-order relational constraint solver.
  Aleksandar Milicevic, Joseph P. Near, Eunsuk Kang, and Daniel Jackson.
  Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2014-018, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014. (link)

• Symbolic execution for (almost) free: Hijacking an existing implementation to perform symbolic execution.
  Joseph P. Near and Daniel Jackson.
  Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2014-007, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2014. (pdf)

• Applications and extensions of Alloy: past, present and future.
  Emina Torlak, Mana Taghdiri, Greg Dennis, and Joseph P. Near.
  In Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, volume 23 number 4, 2013.

• Rubicon: bounded verification of web applications.
  Joseph P. Near and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2012. (pdf)

• A lightweight code analysis and its role in evaluation of a dependability case.
  Joseph P. Near, Aleksandar Milicevic, Eunsuk Kang and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2011.

• An Imperative Extension to Alloy and a Compiler for its Execution.
  Joseph P. Near.
  MIT Masters Thesis, 2010. (pdf)

• From Relational Specifications to Logic Programs.
  Joseph P. Near.
  In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Logic Programming (Technical Communications), 2010. (pdf)

• An Imperative Extension to Alloy.
  Joseph P. Near and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B and Z, 2010. (pdf)

• Equality and Hashing for (almost) Free: Generating Implementations from Abstraction Functions.
  Derek Rayside, Zev Benjamin, Rishabh Singh, Joseph P. Near, Aleksandar Milicevic, and Daniel Jackson.
  In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, 2009.

• alphaleanTAP: A Declarative Theorem Prover for First-Order Classical Logic.
  Joseph P. Near, William E. Byrd, and Daniel P. Friedman.
  In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Logic Programming, 2008. (pdf)

• Uber's New Tool Lets Its Staff Know Less About You.
  By Andy Greenberg. Wired, September 13, 2017.

• Uber Unveils New Privacy Tool That Protects Individual User Data.
  By Kate Conger. Gizmodo, September 13 2017.

• Patching up Web applications.
  By Larry Hardesty. MIT News, April 15, 2016.

• MIT Researchers Forge New Weapon for Code Warriors.
  By John P. Mello Jr. TechNewsWorld, Apr 20, 2016.

Older Projects

• Space: automatic static detection of access control bugs in web applications
• Derailer: visualization-based static analysis for access control in web applications
• Rubicon: bounded verification of web apps