Dung Nguyen's personal homepage
Table of Contents
1. Bio
I am currently a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Virginia and UVA Biocomplexity Institute. I study privacy-preserving algorithms (particularly under the differential privacy framework) in network science with applications in public health policy and health care. My research addresses privacy-preserving algorithms on both theoretical and practical aspects, and from both computational and societal viewpoints:
- Can we solve fundamental graph problems under differential privacy with rigorous utility and privacy guarantees?
- How does privacy affect accuracy, usability, explainability, or fairness in real-world data analyses on sensitive domains?
In somewhat less technical terms, I design algorithms and systems that safeguard your sensitive information while enabling data holders, like researchers, government agencies, or other entities, to share valuable insights from your data with the world. No matter how hard someone examines the published data, they will not discover anything new about your protected information. Meanwhile, your data contributes to more precise research, more informed policies, and smarter AI.
My work on privacy has appeared in ICML, NeurIPS, IJCAI, AISTATS, and Nature Digital Medicine. My Google scholar profile is here. My advisor is Dr. Anil Vullikanti.
My email is <first-name><first-letter-of-last-name>@virginia.edu
2. Publications:
Asterisk (*) indicates equal contributions. (α-β) indicates alphabetical author order.
2.1. Selected publications: (First-authored or alphabetical order papers)
Differentially private exact recovery for stochastic block models
Dung Nguyen and Anil Vullikanti. ICML 2024
Contrastive explainable clustering with differential privacy
Dung Nguyen*, Ariel Vetzler*, Sarit Kraus, and Anil Vullikanti. Pre-print, poster presented at TPDP 2024
Computing epidemic metrics with edge differential privacy
(α-β) George Li, Dung Nguyen, and Anil Vullikanti. AISTATS 2024
Faster approximate subgraph counts with privacy
Dung Nguyen, Mahantesh M Halappanavar, Venkatesh Srinivasan, and Anil Vullikanti. NeurIPS 2023
Differentially private partial set cover with applications to facility location
(α-β) George Li, Dung Nguyen, and Anil Vullikanti. IJCAI 2023
Differentially private community detection for stochastic block models
Mohamed Seif Mohamed*, Dung Nguyen*, Anil Vullikanti, and Ravi Tandon. ICML 2022
Differentially private densest subgraph detection
Dung Nguyen and Anil Vullikanti. ICML 2021
Evaluation of highly available cloud streaming systems for performance and price
Nguyen, D., Luckow, A., Duffy, E., Kennedy, K. and Apon, A.. CCGrid 2018
2.2. Other publications
Privacy-first health research with federated learning
Adam Sadilek, Luyang Liu, Dung Nguyen, Methun Kamruzzaman, Stylianos Serghiou, Benjamin Rader, Alex Ingerman et al. NPJ digital medicine 4, no. 1 (2021): 1-8.
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Srivastava, A., Nguyen, D., Aggarwal, S., Luckow, A., Duffy, E., Kennedy, K., Ziolkowski, M. and Apon, A.. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) pp. 3915-3924, IEEE, 2018.
Using dependency analysis to improve question classification
Le-Hong, P., Phan, X.H. and Nguyen, T.D.. In Knowledge and Systems Engineering, pp. 653-665. Springer, Cham, 2015.
3. Awards
- 2024-25 UVA School of Engineering Endowed Graduate Fellowship (Copenhaver Charitable Trust Bicentennial Fellowship)
- 2024 winner of the data.org's PET Challenge, a worldwide competition focuses on using privacy-preserving techniques to integrate private financial data into epidemiological analysis pipelines for public health policy-making.
4. Others
- Besides working in computer science, I love animals. I have four dogs and two cats, and I'm also a director at VietPaws Rescue Organization. Our ongoing mission is to save dogs, cats, and wild animals from the food industry in Vietnam1. Recently, the first two have just arrived safely in the U.S.
Figure 1: May 2024, the first two rescued dogs have arrived in the US after a years-long process.
Footnotes:
For this reason, I strongly recommend against traveling to Vietnam at this moment if you don't want to encounter these kinds of foods and restaurants everywhere.