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.

Oct 2024 | Attended COLM 2024 in Philadelphia, and UIST 2024 in Pittsburgh.

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

Sep 2024 | Visited Columbia Human-Computer Interaction Group and discussed AI-powered creativity and productivity.

Sep 2024 | Humans got used to prompting AI, but can AI prompt humans to save the planet? Our study says yes! We demonstrated how AI agents can prompt humans’ actions to raise environmental sustainability awareness. Results show a significant increase in intended sustainable behaviors. Check our paper and code!

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“.

Aug 2024 | Wrapped up my internship at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, where I submitted my first-author GenAI patent, and completed system implementation and user studies for my exploration on intent-AI interaction.

Aug 2024 | Visited the Variation Lab @ Harvard University.

Jul 2024 | Delighted to announce the release of a project for which I served as the sole mentor: “Frontend Diffusion: Exploring Intent-Based User Interfaces through Sketching to Coding Task Transition”. Its source code is now available on GitHub. Check our demo and preprint.

Jul 2024 | Invited to review ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

Jun 2024 | Attended C&C 2024 at Chicago, chaired a paper session, served as a student volunteer, and presented poster on “Towards Intent-based User Interfaces: Charting the Design Space of Intent-AI Interactions Across Task Types”.

Jun 2024 | Visited MIT CSAIL and MIT Media Lab.

May 2024 | Gave my talk on Intent-based User Interface at 41st HCIL Symposium at UMD.

May 2024 | Started my internship at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Boston, reporting to Kush Varshney (IBM Fellow).

May 2024 | Visited Google and Cisco in the bay area.

May 2024 | Attended CHI 2024 at Honolulu, HI, chaired a paper session on “writing, sketching and AI”, and served as a student volunteer.

May 2024 | Gave a talk on “Towards Intent-based User Interfaces: Charting the Design Space of Intent-AI Interactions Across Task Types” at UCSD Design Lab.

May 2024 | I’m excited to share that I’ve been selected by UMD to be nominated for the 2024 Google PhD Fellowship, with research proposal “Towards Intent-based User Interfaces: Charting the Design Space of Intent-AI Interactions Across Task Types“.

Apr 2024 | After several stages of development, the research I conducted on Generative AI for news reporting at Dataminr in summer 2022 has culminated in a new product—ReGenAI. This is the first Generative AI that automatically regenerates in real-time as events unfold. Read the story here.

Apr 2024 | Attended CHI southeast meet-up and presented thesis proposal at Emory University, and visited Georgia Tech.

Apr 2024 | Attended UMD Doctoral Candidacy Celebration alongside President Darryll J. Pines and Provost Jennifer King Rice.

Apr 2024 | Submitted my internship project at Microsoft Research as a full paper to UIST 2024.

Mar 2024 | Presented my thesis proposal at IUI 2024 doctoral consortium and poster session in Greenville, SC, and served as a student volunteer.

Mar 2024 | Gave an invited talk at Temple University, hosted by Prof. Stephen MacNeil.

Mar 2024 | Visited Penn HCI group at University of Pennsylvania, hosted by Prof. Andrew Head.

Mar 2024 | Excited to share that I have been advanced to PhD candidacy!

Mar 2024 | Happy to serve as a panelist at admitted PhD student open house.

Mar 2024 | Reviewed CSCW 2024 papers.

Mar 2024 | Served as the program committee of ACM Creativity & Cognition 2024 (reviewed 6 full papers) and CHI 2024 GenAICHI 2024 workshop (reviewed 3 papers).

Mar 2024 | Glad to be selected as student volunteer for CHI 2024, IUI 2024 and Creativity & Cognition 2024.

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

Feb 2023 | Gave a talk about my thesis proposal at HCIL BBL, University of Maryland.

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

Jan 2024 | Happy to announce that I’ll be interning with IBM Research as a research scientist in human-centered generative AI this summer! I will report to Kush Varshney, IBM Fellow.

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!! See you in Hawaii!

Dec 2023 | Attended EMNLP 2023 to present our work from my Dataminr research internship.

Nov 2023 | Invited to be on the program committee and associate chair (AC) of ACM Creativity & Cognition 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.

Nov 2023 | I served as an organizer and panel moderator for the workshop “Riding the LPM Wave The Future of Academic Research in the Era of Large Pre-trained Models” on Nov 3rd.

Nov 2023 | Gave a talk at HCIL BBL, University of Maryland.

Oct 2023 | Reviewed CHI 2024 papers.

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.

Jun 2023 | Presented my research and demo on HC(AI)X Day 2023 at Microsoft Research.

Jun 2023 | Attended ACM Creativity & Cognition 2023 (C&C’23) to present my paper “Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models’ Capacity for Augmenting Cross-Domain Analogical Creativity”. Check the video recording here!

May 2023 | One co-authored journal paper, “How Diverse Initial Samples Help and Hurt Bayesian Optimizers. ASME Journal of Mechanical Design“, was accepted by ASME Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD). Thank you my amazing collaborators!

May 2023 | Joined Microsoft Research Redmond as a research intern working on human-AI collaboration with the EPIC team.

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%). Thank you all my amazing mentors and collaborators!

Mar 2023 | Attended SIGCSE 2023 at Toronto as a paper session chair.

Mar 2023 | Attended LAK 2023 at Dallas, Texas.

Mar 2023 | One first-authored paper was accepted by CHI 2023 Workshop – Generative AI and HCI. It builds on our work of how GPT-3 abilities extend from fixed-scope tasks to more creative ones.

Feb 2023 | Attended AAAI 2023 in Washington DC.

Jul 2022 | Thrilled to be featured in Dataminr intern spotlight (the only research intern of 2022 cohort) and introduce my research to the whole company!

May 2022 | Started my research internship with AI team at Dataminr Inc. (#5 on the Forbes AI 50 List).

May 2022 | Two talks & posters entitled “Computational Analogy: Supporting Creative Problem Reformulation with AI-generated Analogies” and “Exploring Presentation Interaction Effects on Mechanism of Inspiration from Diverse Examples” at UMD HCIL Annual Symposium, College Park, MD.

May 2022 | The backchannel list of our CHI 2022 paper TalkTive was included as common backchannels in “Back Channel Facts”.

May 2022 | Attended CHI 2022 to present our work entitled “TalkTive: A Conversational Agent Using Backchannels to Engage Older Adults in Neurocognitive Disorders Screening” at CHI 2022, New Orleans, LA.

Apr 2022 | Glad to receive UMD Dr. Dana Rotman Doctoral Student Travel Award ($1,550) to attend CHI 2022 and present our work.

Dec 2021 | Thrilled to be featured in UMD iSchool iStar spotlight!

Nov 2021 | Our paper got accepted at CHI 2022. Thank you all my amazing mentors and collaborators!

Oct 2021 | Attended UIST 2021 & CSCW 2021 to present our work.

Sep 2021 | Started my PhD study at UMD iSchool & HCIL and was honored with the Dean’s Fellowship for the academic year 2021-2023.

Jul 2021 | Our demo paper got accepted at UIST 2021.

Jun 2021 | Attended C&C 2021 to present our work.

May 2021 | Attended CHI 2021 to present our work.

Apr 2021 | Our paper got accepted at C&C 2021.

Mar 2021 | Attended CHIIR 2021 to present our work.

Dec 2020 | Three papers got accepted at CHI 2021, CSCW 2021 and CHIIR 2021.