I am He “Albert” Zhang, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University, advised by Distinguished Prof. John M. Carroll, and a student member of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
I build and empirically evaluate LLM- and LMM-based systems that infer meaning from sensitive material — qualitative interview transcripts, facial and physiological affect signals, ambient multimodal home sensing, and camera-mediated assistance for people with visual impairments — and I study how those systems reshape trust, disclosure, control, and agency for the people whose data they process.
When an AI system mediates the interpretation of personal experience, who retains control over what is inferred, retained, and disclosed?
I answer that in three registers at once — I build the systems, I study what people do with them, and I follow what that does downstream. Every paper below sits in one of the three.
Arc ISystems I buildTools, datasets, testbeds and defences — 15 works.
Arc IIEvidence I gatherStudies of what people actually do with them — 18 works.
Arc IIIConsequences I traceWhat it does to trust, ethics and institutions — 7 works.
My dissertation, Integrating Large Language Models into the Qualitative Research Process, takes that question where it bites hardest: qualitative research, where scholars routinely route confidential participant data through commercial models. I work closely with Prof. Syed M. Billah, Prof. ChanMin Kim, and Prof. Xinyi Fu. In 2025 the college named me the recipient of the IST Ph.D. Student Award for Research Excellence.
Before Penn State I spent a year as a full-time research assistant at The Future Laboratory, an interdisciplinary HCI lab at Tsinghua University, building the multimodal affect and smart-home testbeds that much of my systems work still draws on. I hold an M.Sc. in Computer and Mathematical Sciences with first-class honours from Auckland University of Technology (2021) and a B.Sc. with a double major in Computer Science and Data Science from Massey University (2019), both in New Zealand. On the industry side I have worked on applied LLM systems at Genentech and on large-scale behavioural modelling at Experian, Callaghan Innovation, and HKUST’s SyMLab.
Human-Centered AI · Human–AI Interaction · Trustworthy and Responsible AI · LLM/LMM Evaluation and Human Oversight · Affective Computing · Multimodal and Agentic Systems · CSCW · Accessibility · Ubiquitous Computing