News & Updates

Sep 2025 | Submitted 5 CHI 2026 papers.

Aug 2025 | New preprint on evaluating coordination failures and reasoning trade-offs in hierarchical multi-agent robotic systems.

Aug 2025 | Glad to share that our paper “Towards Direct Intent Manipulation: Drag-Based Research Ideation, Evaluation, and Evolution”, has been accepted to UIST 2025 as a poster!

Jul 2025 | Glad to share that our paper “Frontend Diffusion: Empowering Self-Representation of Junior Researchers and Designers Through Agentic Workflows”, led by a student team under my mentorship, has been accepted to VL/HCC 2025!

May 2025 | Attended ICRA 2025 at Atlanta, GA.

Apr 2025 | We successfully launched the first university-wide AI case competition at UMD with the Center for AI in Business at Smith, in collaboration with the NourishNet NSF Convergence Accelerator and Artificial Intelligence Institute of Maryland. Read more here.

Mar 2025 | Excited to introduce Analogical Timeline for the Hype Cycle—a method of using LLM and milestones of one technology (e.g., Generative AI from 2022 to 2025) to predict the future evolution of another (e.g., robotics from 2025 onward). Explore the interactive demo and check out the open-source repository.

Mar 2025 | Glad to share one first-authored full paper, “The Diagram is like Guardrails”: Structuring GenAI-assisted Hypotheses Exploration with an Interactive Shared Representation from my internship at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, is accepted to C&C 2025.

Mar 2025 | Glad to introduce Analogical Timeline: Robot in 2025 as GenAI in 2022 – Riding the robot wave with lessons learned from GenAI boom, and our colloquium in Atlanta on May 18, 2025! Let’s discuss together the trial and error in GenAI back in 2022 to better ride the robot wave in 2025.

Jan 2025 | One first-authored demo of my work at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab is accepted at IUI 2025.

Jan 2025 | Glad to share that our paper “Can AI Prompt Humans?”, which I co-advised, has been accepted at CHI 2025! 🎉 This work uses multimodal agents to simulate the irreversible consequences of environmental destruction, aiming to raise public sustainability awareness. In the face of global climate challenges, this is a timely contribution. Huge thanks to our amazing team for making this possible!

Nov 2024 | Presented my talk “Intent-AI Interaction: Elevating Human-Computer Interaction to the Intent and Conceptual Level” at UMD HCIL.

Oct 2024 | Invited to be on the program committee and associate chair (AC) of ACM Creativity & Cognition 2025.

Sep 2024 🏆 | Glad to receive Post-Candidacy Doctoral Student Research Award ($1,500) to support my research on intent-based data analysis.

Sep 2024 | Excited to share that I’ve been selected by UMD to be nominated for the Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship (one of three campus-wide nominees) and IBM PhD Fellowship, with research proposal “Towards Intent-based User Interfaces: Charting the Design Space of Intent-AI Interactions Across Task Types“.

Feb 2024 | Glad to receive ACM IUI Student Grant ($1,460) from NSF to present my doctoral consortium.

Jan 2024 | My thesis proposal is accepted by the Doctoral Consortium of IUI 2024! See you in Greenville, SC.

Jan 2024 | Glad to share that our paper, “Formulating or Fixating: Effects of Examples on Problem Solving Vary as a Function of Example Presentation Interface Design”, is accepted to CHI 2024.

Nov 2023 | Our JMD paper How Diverse Initial Samples Help and Hurt Bayesian Optimizers was highlighted as a featured article on the Journal of Mechanical Design’s companion site.

Oct 2023 | Thrilled to share that my paper, “Harnessing the power of LLMs: Evaluating human-AI text co-creation through the lens of news headline generation”, from my Dataminr research internship last summer is accepted for EMNLP 2023! -> paper and dataset.

Sep 2023 🏆 | Glad to receive Doctoral Student Research Award ($1,500).

Jun 2023 🏆 | Elated to announce that I’ve been honored with the Dean’s Fellowship ($2,500) for the academic year 2023-2024.

May 2023 🏆 | Thrilled to share that a first-authored paper, “Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models’ Capacity for Augmenting Cross-Domain Analogical Creativity”, was awarded an honorable mention (5% of all papers) by ACM Creativity & Cognition 2023 (C&C’23).

Apr 2023 | Two full papers (one as first author) got accepted at ACM Creativity & Cognition 2023 (C&C’23) (acceptance rate = 21.33%).

[Earlier News & Updates]

Selected Publications

Please check my Google Scholar for my complete publication record.

Full Conference Papers:

1. Z. Wang, Z. Zeng, Y. Li, Z. Ding (advisor). CareerPooler: AI-Powered Metaphorical Pool Simulation Improves Experience and Outcomes in Career Exploration. [pdf]
2. Y. Bai, Z. Ding, A. Taylor. From Virtual Agents to Robot Teams: A Multi-Robot Framework Evaluation in High-Stakes Healthcare Context. [pdf]
3. Z. Ding, Q. Zhang, M. Chi, Z. Wang. Frontend Diffusion: Empowering Self-Representation of Junior Researchers and Designers with Agentic Workflows. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conferences on Creativity and Cognition (VL/HCC’25). [pdf]
4. Z. Ding, M. Brachman, J. Chan, W. Geyer. “The Diagram is like Guardrails”: Structuring GenAI-assisted Hypotheses Exploration with an Interactive Shared Representation. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conferences on Creativity and Cognition 2025 (C&C’25). (work during internship at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab) [ACM DL]
5. Q. Zhang, R. Wen, L. B. Hendra, Z. Ding (co-advisor), R. LC. Can AI Prompt Humans? Multimodal Agents Prompt Players’ Game Actions and Show Consequences to Raise Sustainability Awareness. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’25). [ACM DL]
6. J. Chan, Z. Ding, E. Kamrah, M. Fuge. Towards an Interaction-Oriented Theory of Creative Inspiration from Examples: Experimental Results for the Case of Exploratory Creativity, and an Initial Theoretical Framework. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’24). [ACM DL]
7. Z. Ding, A. Smith-Renner, W. Zhang, J. R. Tetreault, A. James. Harnessing the Power of LLMs: Evaluating Human-AI Interaction through the Lens of News Headline Generation. In Findings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’23), 2023. (Work during internship at Dataminr in 2022 summer) [pdf]
8. Z. Ding, A. Srinivasan, S. MacNeil, J. Chan. Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models’ Capacity for Augmenting Cross-Domain Analogical Creativity. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conferences on Creativity and Cognition 2023 (C&C’23),. (Honorable Mention 🏆) [ACM DL]
9. S. MacNeil, Z. Huang, K. Chen, Z. Ding, A. Yu, K. Nakai, S. P. Dow. Freeform Templates: combining Freeform Curation with Structured Templates. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conferences on Creativity and Cognition 2023 (C&C’23), 2023. [ACM DL]
10. Z. Ding, J. Kang, T.O.T. Ho, K.H. Wong, H.H. Fung, H. Meng, X. Ma. TalkTive: A Conversational Agent Using Backchannels to Engage Older Adults in Neurocognitive Disorders Screening. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’22), 2022. [pdf]
11. S. Palani, Z. Ding, A. Nguyen, A. Chuang, S. MacNeil, S. P. Dow. CoNotate: Suggesting Queries Based on Notes Promotes Knowledge Discovery. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’21), 2021. [pdf]
12. S. MacNeil, Z. Ding, A. Boone, A. B. Grubbs, S. P. Dow. Finding Place in a Design Space: Challenges for Supporting Community Design Efforts at Scale. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’21), 2021. [pdf]
13. S. MacNeil, Z. Ding, K. Quan, T. J. Parashos, Y. Sun, S. P. Dow. Framing Creative Work: Helping Novices Frame Better Problems through Interactive Scaffolding. In Proceedings of the 2021&2022 Conferences on Creativity and Cognition (C&C’21), 2021. [pdf]
14. R. Chang, Q. Wang, Z. Ding. Revolutionizing Urban Energy Planning: A Roadmap Towards City-level Energy Modeling in Australia. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Construction Project Management and Construction Engineering (iCCPMCE’18), 2018. (Best Paper)
15. Q. Wang, S. Zhang, D. Wei, Z. Ding. Additive Manufacturing (AM): A Revolutionized Power for Construction Industrialization. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Construction and Real Estate Management (ICCREM’18), 2018. (Best Paper)

Short Conference Papers (Posters, Workshops, Demos):

1. Z. Ding, F. Li, H. Yu, J. Chan. Towards Direct Intent Manipulation: Drag-Based Research Ideation, Evaluation and Evolution. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2025 Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’25 Poster), 2025. [pdf]
2. Z. Ding, M. Brachman, J. Chan, W. Geyer. Structuring GenAI-assisted Hypotheses Exploration with an Interactive Shared Representation. In Companion Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’25 Demo), 2025. (work during internship at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab) [pdf]
3. Z. Ding. Advancing GUI for Generative AI: Charting the Design Space of Human-AI Interactions through Task Creativity and Complexity. In Companion Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’24 Doctoral Consortium), 2024. [pdf]
4. C. Cao, Z. Ding, G. Lee, J. Jiao, J. Lin, X. Zhai. Elucidating STEM Concepts through Generative AI: A Multi-modal Exploration of Analogical Reasoning. In IJCAI 2023 Symposium on Multimodal Reasoning with LLM (IJCAI’23 Symposium), 2023. [pdf]
5. Z. Ding, J. Chan. Mapping the Design Space of Interactions in Human-AI Text Co-creation Tasks. In CHI 2023 Workshop on Generative AI and HCI (CHI’23 Workshop), 2023. [pdf]
6. S. MacNeil, Z. Ding, K. Quan, Z. Huang, K. Chen, S. P. Dow. ProbMap: Automatically Construct- ing Design Galleries through Feature Extraction and Semantic Clustering. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2021 Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’21 Demo), 2021. [pdf]
7. S. Palani, Z. Ding, S. MacNeil, S. P. Dow. The “Active Search” Hypothesis: How Search Strategies Relate to Creative Learning. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR’21 Poster), 2021. [pdf]

Preprints:

1. Z. Ding, J. Chan. Intelligent Canvas: Enabling Design-Like Exploratory Visual Data Analysis through Rapid Prototyping, Iteration and Curation. [preprint]
2. Q. Zhang, L. B. Hendra, M. Chi, Z. Ding (advisor). Frontend Diffusion: Exploring Intent-Based User Interfaces through Abstract-to-Detailed Task Transitions. [demo video][repo][preprint]

(Non-HCI) Journals:

1. E. Kamrah, S. F. Ghoreishi, Z. Ding, J. Chan, M. Fuge. How Diverse Initial Samples Help and Hurt Bayesian Optimizers. ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. 1-32. [Link] (highlighted as a featured article on the Journal of Mechanical Design’s companion site)
2. S. Chang, Q. Wang, H. Hu, Z. Ding, H. Guo. An NNwC MPPT-Based Energy Supply Solution for Sensor Nodes in Buildings. Energies, 12(1), 1-20.
3. R. Chang, Q. Wang, Z. Ding. How is the Energy Performance of Buildings Assessed in Australia? A Comparison between four Evaluation Systems. International Journal of Structural and Civil Engineering Research, 8(2), 133-137.