(Jennie) Yu Zheng

(Jennie) Yu Zheng

Postdoc at UC Irvine

Biography

[Curriculum Vitae] [Google Scholar] [GitHub] [LinkedIn] [X/Twitter]

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at University of California, Irvine (UCI) advised by Prof. Zhou Li. My research interests focus on privacy-preserving systems, secure machine learning, and applied cryptography. If you are interested into my research, welcome to contact me.

Prior to UCI, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in 2024 from the Department of Information Engineering at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and became an Interim Researcher co-advised by Prof. Kehuan Zhang (also Thesis Committee Chair) at CUHK and Prof. Kai Zhou at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I received my Bachelor’s degree (ranking: 1/96) in 2018 in the Department of Communication Engineering at Northeastern University, China advised by Prof. Chong Fu. In industry, I finished the research internship at Ant Group (previously Alibaba Group) mentored by Dr. Qizhi Zhang and Dr. Lichun Li.

News

  • [May 2025] I am excited to attend S&P in San Francisco. I will share our poster work about ‘‘Grace’’ at DLSP@S&P on May 15. I would be very appreciated if you could give comments and suggestions!
  • [Nov 2024] I am excited to attend NSF NeTS Early Career Investigator Workshop on January 15-16, 2025. I am grateful for NSF Travel Grant and my advisor’s great help! See you in Alexandria, Virginia ~
  • [Sep 2024] I joined DSP lab hosted by Prof. Zhou Li at University of California, Irvine!
  • [Jun 2024] I passed my PhD defense!

Academic Degrees

  • [2018 - 2024] PhD in Information Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR.
  • [2014 - 2018] BEng in Communication Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China.

Working Experience

  • [Aug-Sep 2024] Interim Researcher at Hong Kong Polytechnic University & Chinese University of Kong Kong.
  • [May-Sep 2022] Research Intern at Alibaba Group & Ant Group.
  • [Sep-Nov 2020] Research Intern at 2012 Labs.
  • [Mar-May 2018] Research Assistant at Chinese University of Kong Kong.

Selected Publication

# denotes equal contribution.

  • Xiangfu Song, Yu Zheng, Jianli Bai, Changyu Dong, Zheli Liu, and Ee-Chien Chang. “DISCO: Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Constant State.” ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), 2024.

  • Yu Zheng, Wenchao Zhang, Wei Song, Xiuhua Wang, and Chong Fu. “Encrypted Video Search with Single/Multiple Writers.” ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), 2024. (Invited Submission)

  • Zhiqin Yang, Yonggang Zhang, Yu Zheng, Xinmei Tian, Hao Peng, Tongliang Liu, and Bo Han. “FedFed: Feature Distillation against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.

  • Yu Zheng#, Qizhi Zhang#, Sherman S.M. Chow, Yuxiang Peng, Sijun Tan, Lichun Li, and Shan Yin. “Secure Softmax/Sigmoid for Machine-Learning Computation.” Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 2023. [Available Badge, Functional Badge, Reproduced Badge]

  • Yu Zheng, Wei Song, Minxin Du, Sherman S.M. Chow, Qian Lou, Yongjun Zhao, Xiuhua Wang. “Cryptography-Inspired Federated Learning Variants for GAN and Meta Learning.” International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA), 2023.

  • Yu Zheng, Heng Tian, Minxin Du, and Chong Fu. “Encrypted Video Search: Scalable, Modular, and Content-similar.” ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), 2022. (Best Student Paper Award)

Program Committee

CCS AE (24’,23’), NDSS AE (24’, also Discussion Lead in 24’), TheWebConf AE (24’), USENIX Security AE (24’), AAAI (25’), AJCAI (23’), EAI ICECI (24’), ICNC (25’).

Session Chair/Host: RSA’25 (San Francisco, USA), AsiaCCS’24 (Singapore), …

Review Service

Cryptography (Official): AsiaCCS (24’), IEEE TDSC (24’), IEEE TSC (24’), Information Sciences (24’,23’)

Learning (Official): AISTATS (24’), ICLR (24’), ICML (24’), NeurIPS (24’,23’), NCAA (23’), TVCJ (22’), JMANS (23’)

Cryptography (External): AsiaCCS (19’), CRYPTO (19’), ESORICS (19’), ICICS (19’), IEEE S&P (25’), IEEE TIFS (19’), ISC (19’), NDSS (25’), RAID (23’), SecureComm (19’,18’), TheWebConf (23’,20’)

Awards

  • [2024] Conference Travel Award of IEEE SaTML, UToronto, Canada.
  • [2023] Summer Research Institute Fellowship of EPFL, Switzerland.
  • [2022] ACM MMSys Best Student Paper Award.
  • [2018] Postgraduate Studentship (~ 5 Years) offered by CUHK-IE.
  • [2017] ICCT Best Paper Award.
  • [2016/2015] National Scholarship of China (Top 0.2%).

Misc

I like reading and sports. And …