James Flemings

Hello! I am a fourth-year CS PhD student at the University of Southern California advised by Murali Annavaram in the SCIP (Super Computing In Pocket) lab. I’m graciously funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My research broadly investigates privacy in language models. In particular, I’m interested in (1) improving privacy reasoning of language models; (2) principally understanding and measuring privacy leakage of language models (memorization, inference-time auditing); (3) controlling privacy leakage of language models (differential privacy)

Previously, I interned at Google in the Federated Learning and Analytics team during Summer 2025, investigating personalized privacy in agents. I also interned at TikTok during Summer 2024 in the Privacy Innovation Lab, exploring hallucination and privacy in langauge models. Before graduate school, I received my BS in computer science and mathematics at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2022. While there, I pursued research in a wide range of areas, including monochromatic colorings, charged coupled devices, federated learning, and out of distribution data performance in language models.