Haochen Sun
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Haochen Sun

I am a PhD candidate in the Data Systems Group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, advised by Prof. Xi He. My research focuses on enhancing the security and privacy of machine learning and data management systems using differential privacy (DP) and cryptography. I am actively seeking a research internship in areas related to differential privacy, including secure computations for DP and DP foundation models.

News

  • (September 2025) I passed the Comprehensive II exam.
  • (August 2025) I am honoured to have received the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship!
  • (May 2025) Check out our latest work on verifiable computation for distributed DP: VDDP.

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 2022 - Present
  • BSc in Data Science & Technology and Computer Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2018 - 2022

Publications

Blue denotes my current PhD thesis work (since May 2024), with more publications forthcoming. Gray denotes publications from previous projects that I am no longer involved with. An asterisk (*) indicates co-first authorship.

  1. Haochen Sun and Xi He. "VDDP: Verifiable Distributed Differential Privacy under the Client–Server–Verifier Setup." Preprint, 2025.
  2. Haochen Sun*, Shufan Zhang*, Karl Knopf*, Shubhankar Mohapatra, Wei Pang, Calvin Wang, Yingke Wang, Masoumeh Shafieinejad, David Emerson, and Xi He. "FedDPSyn: Federated Tabular Data Synthesis with Computational Differential Privacy." Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP), 2025.
  3. Haochen Sun, Jason Li, and Hongyang Zhang. "zkLLM: Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Large Language Models." Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024.
  4. Haochen Sun, Tonghe Bai, Jason Li, and Hongyang Zhang. "zkDL: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Deep Learning Training." IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2025.
  5. Haochen Sun, Jimmy C. H. Fung, Yiang Chen, Zhenning Li, Dehao Yuan, Wanying Chen, and Xingcheng Lu. "Development of an LSTM broadcasting deep-learning framework for regional air pollution forecast improvement." Geoscientific Model Development, 2022.
  6. Haochen Sun, Jimmy C. H. Fung, Yiang Chen, Wanying Chen, Zhenning Li, Yeqi Huang, Changqing Lin, Mingyun Hu, and Xingcheng Lu. "Improvement of PM2.5 and O3 forecasting by integration of 3D numerical simulation with deep learning techniques." Sustainable Cities and Society, 2021.

Contact

  • Email: To ensure your message reaches me, please use your institutional email address. Messages from personal accounts like Gmail or 163.com, or emails written in non-English or overly brief/informal styles, may be mistakenly filtered as spam.
  • SIP: For Zoom, Teams, and similar platforms.
  • Office: DC 3553, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada. Please do not visit my office without prior notice unless we are close academic collaborators, personal friends, or you are attending my scheduled office hours for a course I am TA'ing. If we haven't worked together before or only exchanged brief emails, kindly reach out to arrange a meeting. Unannounced visits can be disruptive and are generally not appropriate.
  • WeChat, Telegram, etc. are not used for professional communication. This is in accordance with university policy and guidelines, and is also a result of prior negative and unacceptable incidents.

Quick Links

  • Download CV
  • Google Scholar
  • DBLP Profile
  • GitHub Profile
  • LinkedIn Profile