David M. Erb

Computer Science Master's student @ ETH

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I am a Computer Science Master’s student at ETH Zurich. I completed my BSc in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2026, and am a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) throughout my studies. During my Bachelor’s, I completed a research internship in the PreMeDICaL Team at Inria, where I wrote my Bachelor’s thesis under the supervision of Aurélien Bellet. I am deeply interested in Differential Privacy (DP) and its applications in building trustworthy machine learning models.

Previously, I spent a year as a Visiting Undergraduate Student at Harvard University. Alongside my academic work, I also gained applied industry experience as a Research Engineering Intern at Oblivious. Outside of my research, you can find me playing soccer or learning Mandarin Chinese.

news

Sep 24, 2026 Our paper Lumberjack: Better Differentially Private Random Forests through Heavy Hitter Detection in Trees was accepted to NeurIPS 2026! :tada:
Sep 14, 2026 I graduated from Technical University of Munich and am starting a Master’s degree in Computer Science at ETH Zurich, majoring in Theoretical Computer Science with a Minor in Information Security.
Jun 24, 2026 Attended the CNIL Privacy Research Day in Paris and gave a talk on our paper Privacy in Theory, Bugs in Practice: Grey-Box Auditing of Differential Privacy Libraries. A recording can be found here.
Feb 23, 2026 Check out our new blog post on auditing differential privacy software! :sparkles:

selected publications

  1. dp_recorder_preview.svg
    Privacy in Theory, Bugs in Practice: Grey-Box Auditing of Differential Privacy Libraries
    Tudor Cebere, David Erb, Damien Desfontaines, and 2 more authors
    PETS 2026
  2. lumberjack.svg
    Lumberjack: Better Differentially Private Random Forests through Heavy Hitter Detection in Trees
    Christian Janos Lebeda, David Erb, Tudor Cebere, and 1 more author
    (to appear in) NeurIPS 2026