Zhou (Joe) Li, (李洲)
Associate Professor
University of California, Irvine
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Irvine, CA 92697-2625, USA
Office: 3227 Engineering Hall
Email: zhou.li@uci.edu
My CV.
Announcement: I’m serving the IEEE S&P’26 donation chair. Please contact me if your organization is interested in sponsoring this event!
About openings: I am constantly looking for self-motivated PhD students and PostDoc researchers who have strong interests in system security and privacy. Visitors are also welcome. If you are interested, send me an email and please specify how your prior experiences relate to my research areas. Due to the volume of inquiries, my apology if you don’t receive my reply.
News
– September 2025: Received API credits from OpenAI Researcher Access Program. Many thanks to OpenAI!
– September 2025: Serving IEEE S&P’26 donation chair.
– August 2025: Serving IEEE TDSC Associate Editor.
– August 2025: Welcome Minsun Shim joining the DSP lab as a PhD student!
– August 2025: Proposal funded under NSF PDaSP Track 1. Many thanks to NSF!
Professional Bio
I am an associate professor in the department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science of University of California, Irvine. My research focus is security and privacy.
- I’m also affiliated with UCI Center for Embedded and Cyber-phyiscal Systems (CECS), UCI Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute (CPRI), UCI NetSys and UCI Future Health.
- I was a principal research scientist at RSA Laboratories working on security analytics before joining UCI.
- I’m an IEEE senior member and ACM senior member.
- I received IEEE Big Data Security Junior Research Award 2024, NSF CAREER Award in 2021, Microsoft Security AI RFP award in 2021, Amazon Research Award in 2022 and IRTF ANRP award in 2020.
Project Websites
- [Completed] Maestro – Robust AI (NSF EAGER-SaTC)
- DNS debug (NSF CAREER)
- Differentially Private Internet Measurement (NSF IMR)
Recent Research Areas & Interests
- Internet security
- DNS Protocol security [Security’18][CoNext’19][FOCI’20][NDSS’23][Security’23a]
- DNS Measurement [IMC’19][NDSS’21][SRDS’21]
- Malicious domain detection [DSN’15][CCS’17]
- Domain fraud [Security’14][Security’16][EuroS&P’19][SecureComm’18a][DSN’18][SecureComm’19]
- Organizational network security
- Graph Neural Network (GNN) based anomaly detection [Security’23b]
- Efficient attack provenance [Security’21]
- Detection with web proxy logs [DSN’15][SecDev’16][ACSAC’16][ACSAC’18a]
- Detection with end-host logs [RAID’17]
- Privacy Enhancement Technologies (PETs)
- Application of differential privacy (DP) [EuroSP’22]
- Data stream DP [CCS’21a]
- Security and privacy for machine learning
- Model extraction attacks with side-channel [DSN’20][TIFS’21][ACSAC’22]
- Data extraction [ACSAC’21a]
- Adversarial perturbation [IJCAI’20][TDSC’22][DSN’23]
- Education [EAAI’23]
Experience & Education
2025-, Associate Professor at UCI EECS
2018-2025, Assistant Professor at UCI EECS
2013-2018, Principal Research Scientist at RSA Laboratories
2011, Research Intern at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, Mentor: Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu
2014, Ph.D. in Computer Science, Indiana University Bloomington, Advisor: XiaoFeng Wang
2008, M.Sc. in Computer Science, Wuhan University, China
2006, B.Sc. in Computer Science, Wuhan University, China
Support
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You can also find me at Google Scholar, DBLP, ResearchGate, SemanticScholar, LinkedIn and Twitter.