Joshua Swanson

Hey there!

I'm Joshua Swanson.

I hold an MSc in Computer Science from ETH Zürich, with a major in Machine Intelligence and a minor in Data Management, and a BA in Mathematics and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

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

Find me on the internet:

Projects

Small tools and side projects I build for fun.

Inventory Tracker

Self-hosted web app for tracking dental clinic inventory, built for a friend's practice.

iOS Activity Monitor

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

LaTeX PDF Translator preview

LaTeX PDF Translator

Translates LaTeX-typeset PDFs to English while preserving mathematical notation.

Monitor Comparison Tool preview

Monitor Comparison Tool

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

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.

SSH GUI

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

Ultimate Guide to Swiss German preview

Ultimate Guide to Swiss German for English Speakers

A practical guide to Züridütsch for English speakers, written from my own notes as a Master's student in Zürich.

Ballroom

A log of my competitive ballroom dancing journey in Switzerland.

I competed in the 71st ETDS (European Tournament for Dancing Students) in Enschede, Netherlands, and qualified for the Latin Legends category.

I placed 4th in D class Latin at the Trafo Cup in Baden, Switzerland.

I placed 3rd in Latin Masters at the 70th ETDS (European Tournament for Dancing Students) in Monheim am Rhein.

Publications

The complete works.

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)

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

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

ICLR 2026

Say hello.

Don't be a stranger.

Find me on the internet:

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 follows the standard ETH format: first initial + last name at ethz.ch.