Joshua Swanson

Researcher in AI security, privacy, and safety

Joshua Swanson

About Me

I work at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in the COMPASS group, under the supervision of Sahar Abdelnabi.

Prior to that, I earned an MSc in Computer Science from ETH Zürich, with a major in Machine Intelligence and a minor in Data Management. As an undergraduate, I earned a BA in Mathematics and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

My research interests are in AI security, privacy and safety. My most recent co-authored paper has been highlighted by ETH Zürich and featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg, and others.

Publications

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs

Simon Lermen*, Daniel Paleka*, Joshua Swanson, Michael Aerni, Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramèr

USENIX Security 2026; ICLR 2026 Workshop (Agents in the Wild)

PDF
Media coverage: The New York Times The Guardian Bloomberg The Independent El País The Verge Ars Technica show more Highlighted by: ETH Zurich Department of Computer Science Zurich Information Security & Privacy Center Discussed on: X / Twitter (September 2026) X / Twitter (March 2026) X / Twitter (February 2026) Reddit Hacker News

Modal Aphasia: Can Unified Multimodal Models Describe Images From Memory?

Michael Aerni*, Joshua Swanson*, Kristina Nikolic, Florian Tramèr

ICLR 2026

PDF Code Blog

Games

Browser games I built for fun.

Battleship Bonanza

Cute boats. Big guns. Pick two attachments and race to the finish!

Live

Depths of Doom

Dive in if you dare.

Live

Projects

Small tools and side projects.

Live process monitor for a USB-tethered iPhone or iPad. Like macOS Activity Monitor, but for iOS.

GitHub

LATEX PDF Translator

Translate non-English LaTeX-typeset PDFs to English while preserving mathematical notation.

Live

Mnitr Cmparisn

Interactive scatter plot for comparing monitor specs like PPI, screen area, and price.

Live

Slides to Video

Turn a slide deck into a narrated video with AI voice cloning. Upload a PDF, write a script, provide a voice sample, get a presentation video.

GitHub

Finder-style desktop GUI for SSH servers. Column browser, integrated terminal, drag-and-drop file transfer.

GitHub

Surviving Switzerland

Things I built while figuring out Zürich.

The Ultimate Guide to
Swiss German for
English Speakers

A practical guide to the Zurich dialect of Swiss German for English speakers, written from my own notes as a Master's student in Zürich.

Live

Scrape the major Swiss housing platforms, filter and map the results, and generate tailored application messages en masse.

GitHub

Contact

I am echoing the standing invitation:

I like getting email. I have never, not even once, regretted getting email from a startup, engineer, student, or person interested in our industry. There is absolutely nothing you can do in my inbox which will cause me to think poorly of you as a person or make fun of you to my friends. The worst thing that has ever happened from someone sending me an email is me being a bit busy that day and not replying. Feel free to send me email.

— Patrick McKenzie

My email is of the following format: first name dot last name at tuebingen dot mpg dot country code.