I'm an applied cryptographer and usable security/privacy researcher. I’m currently a Postdoctoral Associate in computer science at Georgetown University where I work closely with Elissa Redmiles. I'm also a Fritz Fellow within Georgetown's Initiative for Technology and Society and a Massive Data Institute Fellow at the McCourt School of Public Policy. Last December, I completed my PhD in computer science with a focus on applied cryptography at Brown University where I was advised by Seny Kamara. Feel free to send me an email (my signal username is also available upon request)---I'm always happy to connect and talk about research! email | google scholar | twitter | github
* Names listed alphabetically. Additional publications available here. (Mis)use of Nude Images in Machine Learning Research Arshia Arya, Princesa Cintaqia, Deepak Kumar, Allison McDonald, Lucy Qin*, Elissa M. Redmiles Tiny paper selected for presentation at the Evaluating Evaluations: Examining Best Practices for Measuring Broader Impacts of Generative AI (EvalEval) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024 "Did They F***ing Consent to That?": Safer Digital Intimacy via Proactive Protection Against Image-Based Sexual Abuse. Lucy Qin, Vaughn Hamilton, Sharon Wang, Yigit Aydinalp, Marin Scarlett, Elissa M. Redmiles USENIX Security 2024 Secure Account Recovery for a Privacy-Preserving Web Service. Ryan Little, Lucy Qin, Mayank Varia USENIX Security 2024 Synq: Public Policy Analytics over Encrypted Data. Zachary Espiritu, Marilyn George, Seny Kamara, Lucy Qin* IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2024 You Still See Me: Data Protection Supports the Architecture of ML Surveillance. Rui-Jie Yew, Lucy Qin, Suresh Venkatasubramanian NeurIPS Workshop on Regulatable ML 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) 2024 (Best Student Paper Runner-Up) Attached to “The Algorithm”: Making Sense of Algorithmic Precarity on Instagram. Yim Register, Lucy Qin, Amanda Baughan, Emma S. Spiro ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2023 A Decentralized and Encrypted National Gun Registry. [Wired, Conference Video, Seminar Video] Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz, Andrew Park, Lucy Qin* IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2021 From Usability to Secure Computing and Back Again. [Video, Slides] Lucy Qin, Andrei Lapets, Frederick Jansen, Peter Flockhart, Kinan Dak Albab, Ira Globus-Harris, Shannon Roberts, Mayank Varia. USENIX Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (SOUPS) 2019 Callisto: A Cryptographic Approach to Detecting Serial Perpetrators of Sexual Misconduct. Anjana Rajan, Lucy Qin, David W. Archer, Dan Boneh, Tancrède Lepoint, Mayank Varia. ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) 2018 Accessible Privacy-Preserving Web-Based Data Analysis for Assessing and Addressing Economic Inequalities. Andrei Lapets, Frederick Jansen, Kinan Dak Albab, Rawane Issa, Lucy Qin, Mayank Varia, Azer Bestavros ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) 2018
Toward Safer Intimate Futures: Recommendations for Tech Platforms to Reduce Image Based Sexual Abuse Lucy Qin, Vaughn Hamilton, Yigit Aydinalp, Marin Scarlett, Sharon Wang, Elissa M. Redmiles European Sex Workers Rights Alliance Report. 2023. Outside Looking In: Approaches to Content Moderation in End-to-End Encrypted Systems. Seny Kamara, Mallory Knodel, Emma Llansó, Greg Nojeim, Lucy Qin*, Dhanaraj Thakur, Caitlin Vogus Center for Democracy and Technology Report. 2021.
CSCI 1952V: Algorithms for the People
Co-Instructor. Brown Computer Science. Fall 2021.
Hiding in Plain Sight: An Introduction to the Art of Cryptography
Instructor. Brown Pre-College. Summer 2021 & 2022.
I've been a member of Callisto's cryptography advisory board since 2018 and was a contributor to the cryptographic design of their service, which has been deployed and is available to college students across the U.S. I also wrote the cryptographic code for an earlier prototype. Alongside Alishah Chator and Leah Namisa Rosenbloom, I co-organize the Re-Imagining Cryptography and Privacy (ReCAP) Workshop. The workshop seeks to explore the ways in which cryptography and privacy intersect with society toward designing, creating, and sustaining technologies that explicitly benefit marginalized communities. I'm also member of a multi-stakeholder working group to address image-based sexual abuse, recently co-hosted a workshop on Designing Safe(r) Digital Intimacy at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and have contributed to a few formal responses on image-based sexual abuse/AI policy: Meta Oversight Board "Explicit AI Images of Female Public Figures", NIST AI 100-4, NIST AI Executive Order, FTC Commercial Surveillance and Data Security Rulemaking. The following are selected articles that explicitly discuss the technical components of projects I have worked on: Wired Magazine, the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Boston Globe. I was also interviewed for this Wired piece. While I was a PhD student, I was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. In 2023, I was a finalist for the Meta Research PhD Fellowship. I've served on the following program committees: USENIX (2025), PETS (2025), ACM FAccT (2023), ACM EEAMO (2021 & 2023), MD4SG Workshop (2020) At Brown, I served on the CS Diversity Committee (2020-2022) and the CS PhD Admissions Committee (2023). I don't code as much these days but I previously contributed to the following libraries: OPRF (a javascript implementation of an oblivious pseudo-random function), Web-MPC (platform for deploying web-based privacy-preserving data surveys using secure multi-party computation), Constellation-JS.