Ph.D. candidate in Informatics
College of Information Sciences and Technology
Human-centered AI · Human–computer interaction
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I develop and evaluate LLM-based and multimodal agents that support research and decision-making, with a focus on reliability and human oversight.
I am a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State, advised by Distinguished Prof. John M. Carroll, and a student member of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
My work spans AI-supported interviewing and qualitative coding, multimodal interaction, accessibility, and the safety of AI agents in everyday settings. I combine system building, computational evaluation, and empirical studies with people.
I work closely with Prof. Syed M. Billah, Prof. ChanMin Kim, and Prof. Xinyi Fu. In 2025, I received 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.
International Journal of Human–Computer Studies · Online 2026 · Vol. 219, 103950 (2027 issue)
ACM UbiComp 2026 Companion · Best Poster Award Runner-Up
Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 2025
International Journal of Human–Computer Studies · Online 2026 · Vol. 219, 103950 (2027 issue)
ACM IMX 2026 Doctoral Consortium
DIS 2026 Companion · first author is an undergraduate mentee
ACM UbiComp 2026 Companion · Best Poster Award Runner-Up
Tutorial, IUI 2026, Limassol · lead organizer and instructor
ASPIRE · HFES Annual Meeting, 2026
ICLR 2025 Workshop on Bidirectional Human–AI Alignment · Oral at CHI ’25
IEEE ISMAR-Adjunct 2025
Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 2025
CHI 2024 Best Paper Honorable Mention
Best Paper Honorable MentionIEEE Transactions on Games, 2024
iConference 2024
Future Internet, 16(10), 2024
arXiv:2310.07061
Science & Technology Review, 41(8), 2023
Patent, China, CN115291718A
Packaging Engineering, 43(16), 2022
China Patent CN115268287B · Granted August 6, 2024 · Filed 2022
Our study of AI-generated follow-up questions in semi-structured interviews is available online in the International Journal of Human–Computer Studies.
PromptShield Home received the UbiComp 2026 Best Poster Award Runner-Up.
I’ll serve as Associate Chair for the CHI 2027 Full Paper Track.
I designed and taught AI4Qual, a full tutorial on LLM-supported qualitative research, at IUI 2026 in Limassol, and presented our AIoT home-agent architecture in the companion track.
Our demo Wolfborn was presented at DIS 2026 in Singapore — first-authored by an undergraduate I mentored from the ground up. [demo.1]
I presented our comparison of human versus AI-powered support in VRChat communities at IMX 2026 in Athlone.
I presented VR Calm Plus at CHI 2026 in Barcelona — the third iteration of a tangible-plus-VR system built with two undergraduate mentees.
When the Interviewer Is a Bot appears at HCOMP 2026; our study of Twitch developers’ support practices is accepted to CSCW 2026.
I was named runner-up for the IST Award for Excellence in Teaching Support.
I chaired a paper session at CSCW 2025 in Bergen, and presented two pieces of the affect work — VR Calm+ at ISMAR and our zero-shot facial emotion benchmark at MRAC.
AI Trust Reshaping Administrative Burdens appeared at FAccT 2025.
I received the Ph.D. Student Award for Research Excellence and the Alumni Association Graduate Fellowship.
Two at CHI 2025 in Yokohama — smartphone interaction of blind users with LMMs, and generative AI in the VRChat Discord community — plus an oral on our human–LMM annotation framework.
NaviGPT was presented at GROUP 2025 — real-time multimodal navigation for people with visual impairments.
Our Twitch third-party developer study received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI 2024, in the top 3.7% of 4,028 submissions.
VRMN-bD, our multimodal fear-response dataset, was presented at IEEE VR 2024.
I joined a Big Ideas Grant seed award at Penn State as co-principal investigator.
Since 2021 I have recruited and mentored 31 students — 18 undergraduate, 12 master’s, and 1 research assistant — across 14 institutions in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong.
They contributed to 12 projects I initiated and led. I set the research questions, directed study and system design, supervised data collection and analysis, and mentored manuscript preparation. 21 mentees have co-authored peer-reviewed papers with me — several as second author, one as co-first author, and one I mentored through first authorship. Five have stayed with me across multiple projects.
Lead organizer and instructor, full tutorial, Limassol, Cyprus · July 2026
Talks and lectures at Penn State, San José State, Tsinghua, FGV EBAPE, and the AAIS Digital Health Virtual Community
Teaching assistant — Spring 2025, Fall 2025, Fall 2026
IT Project Management; Data, Environment, and Society
Associate Chair, Full Paper Track
Associate Chair, Poster Tracks
AC for User Experience and Usability and for Late-Breaking Work; Ninja AC, Paper Track, and AC, Poster Track
ICHEC · ICLR Workshop on Bidirectional Human–AI Alignment · LAW at NeurIPS
ACM Learning at Scale
ChCHI · ACII · DG.O
CSCW 2025, Bergen — Making Work Meetings Better. CHI 2025, Yokohama — Co-ideation; Creativity Support
ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST, DIS, HCOMP, L@S, SIGGRAPH, Multimedia, MobileHCI, UbiComp/IMWUT, VRST, CHI PLAY, ASSETS · AAAI, COLM, ICLR and NeurIPS workshops · IEEE VR, ISMAR, ISWC · AIS ICIS
IJHCI · Computers in Human Behavior and CHB Reports · Sociological Methods and Research · International Journal of Qualitative Methods · Policy Studies Journal · Journal of Learning Analytics · Multimedia Tools and Applications · Cogent Arts & Humanities
CHI ’24, ’25, ’26 · CSCW ’24, ’25
ACM IMX 2026 · CHI 2025 · UIST 2024
International Chinese Association of Computer Human Interaction
The Pennsylvania State University · Advisor: John M. Carroll
Auckland University of Technology · First-Class Honors
Massey University · Double major
PromptShield Home · First author
EUR 1,000
Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology
Third-Party Developers and Tool Development for Community Management on Twitch · Top 3.7% of submissions
Penn State · $49,934 seed funding
$5,000
NZD $7,625
Runner-up · Penn State