Joe Near

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

[ Books | Teaching | Students | Service | 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
	Differential Privacy for Databases By Joseph P. Near and Xi He
Programming MPC	Programming MPC By Joseph P. Near

• CS 3120/5120: Secure Distributed Computation (Spring 2026)
• CS 3110/5110: Data Privacy (Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023)
• CS 3020: Compiler Construction (Spring 2025, Spring 2024)
• CS 3990/5990: Secure Distributed Computation (Fall 2023)

• Craig Agricola (PhD)
• Mako Bates (Postdoc)
• Prianka Bhattacharjee (PhD)
• Onyinye Dibia (PhD)
• Syed Jafri (PhD)
• Krystal Maughan (PhD)
• Ivoline Ngong (PhD)
• Ratang Sedimo (PhD)

Organization

• TPDP: Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (2024, 2025)
• miniKanren: The miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop (2024)
• FCS: Foundations of Computer Security Workshop (2022, 2021)

Program Committees

• 2026: CCS, USENIX Security, PETS, VLDB, TPDP
• 2025: CCS, USENIX Security, PETS
• 2024: CCS, AISTATS, PETS
• 2023: CCS, VLDB, TPDP
• 2022: CCS, AISTATS, VLDB, TPDP
• 2021: TPDP
• 2020: TPDP, FCS

• I work with NIST on efforts like the Privacy Engineering Collaboration Space and Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees
• Until March 2025, I worked with Galois on auditing differential privacy mechanisms for the US Census Bureau

• Differentially Private Multimodal In-Context Learning
  Ivoline C. Ngong, Zarreen Reza, Joseph P. Near
  
• Distributed HDMM: Scalable, Distributed, Accurate, and Differentially Private Query Workloads without a Trusted Curator
  Ratang Sedimo, Ivoline C. Ngong, Jami Lashua, Joseph P. Near
  
• DT-SIM: Property-Based Testing for MPC Security
  Mako Bates, Joseph P. Near
  
• Improving Utility for Privacy-Preserving Analysis of Correlated Columns using Pufferfish Privacy
  Krystal Maughan, Joseph P. Near
  
• Prediction Sensitivity: Continual Audit of Counterfactual Fairness in Deployed Classifiers
  Krystal Maughan, Ivoline C. Ngong, Joseph P. Near
  
• Secret Sharing Sharing For Highly Scalable Secure Aggregation
  Timothy Stevens, Joseph P. Near, Christian Skalka
  
• Do I Get the Privacy I Need? Benchmarking Utility in Differential Privacy Libraries
  Gonzalo Munilla Garrido, Joseph P. Near, Aitsam Muhammad, Warren He, Roman Matzutt, Florian Matthes
  

Recent Publications

• Beyond Fixed Psychological Personas: State Beats Trait, but Language Models are State-Blind
  Tamunotonye Harry, Ivoline C. Ngong, Chima Nweke, Yuanyuan Feng, Joseph P. Near
  In ACL, 2026
  (PDF)
• "We Need a Standard": Toward an Expert-Informed Privacy Label for Differential Privacy
  Onyinye Dibia, Mengyi Lu, Prianka Bhattacharjee, Joseph P. Near, Yuanyuan Feng
  In PETS, 2026
  (PDF)
• SoK: Usability Studies in Differential Privacy
  Onyinye Dibia, Brad Stenger, Steven Baldasty, Mako Bates, Ivoline C. Ngong, Yuanyuan Feng, Joseph P. Near
  In PETS, 2025
  (PDF)
• Efficient, Portable, Census-Polymorphic Choreographic Programming
  Mako Bates, Shun Kashiwa, Syed Jafri, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper, Joseph P. Near
  In PLDI, 2025
  (PDF)
• SMT-Boosted Security Types for Low-Level MPC
  Christian Skalka, Joseph P. Near
  In ESOP, 2025
  (PDF)
• Differentially Private Learning Needs Better Model Initialization and Self-Distillation
  Ivoline C. Ngong, Joseph P. Near, Niloofar Mireshghallah
  In NAACL, 2025
  (PDF)
• Foldable, Recursive Proofs of Isogeny Computation with Reduced Time Complexity
  Krystal Maughan, Joseph P. Near, Christelle Vincent
  In IEEE QCE, 2024
  (PDF)
• Language-Based Security for Low-Level MPC
  Christian Skalka, Joseph P. Near
  In PPDP, 2024
  (PDF)
• Evaluating the Usability of Differential Privacy Tools with Data Practitioners
  Ivoline C. Ngong, Brad Stenger, Joseph P. Near, Yuanyuan Feng
  In SOUPS, 2024
  (PDF)
• OLYMPIA: A Simulation Framework for Evaluating the Concrete Scalability of Secure Aggregation Protocols
  Ivoline C. Ngong, Nicholas Gibson, Joseph P. Near
  In IEEE SaTML, 2024
  (PDF)