I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My research spans Human-AI Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction, Quantitative Studies of Science, and Information Visualization. I am particularly interested in how people interact with intelligent systems and how AI can support scientific discovery.
My work has been published in venues such as JASIST, CHIIR, HRI, Journal of Informetrics, Scientometrics, and Information Processing & Management. I have received funding from the National Science Foundation, Amazon Research Awards, Google, and the University of Tennessee.
Before joining UTK, I completed my Ph.D. in Information Science at Drexel University. I hold a Master’s degree in Information Science from Wuhan University and dual Bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science from Nanjing Tech University. I also worked as an software engineer at Tencent.
news
| 05-18-2026 | Amazon Research Awards funded for Generative UI research ($70,000+$50,000 AWS credits)! |
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| 05-10-2026 | Journal paper accepted at Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. |
| 04-21-2026 | UTK CCI I³ Research Funding Award awarded ($2,500) for Investigating AI-Mediated News Consumption . |
| 04-15-2026 | UTK CCI AI Grant awarded ($9,981) for social robots in collaborative learning. |
| 04-15-2026 | UTK CCI AI Grant awarded ($9,420) for a generative AI chatbots project (Co-PI). |
| 04-13-2026 | My student Wanqi Zhang received the CCI Graduate Student Research Award (2026)! |
| 04-08-2026 | Interviewed and featured in Scientific American for our HRI ‘26 paper and preprint. |
| 03-22-2026 | Short paper accepted at CHIIR ‘26. |
| 03-20-2026 | Two papers accepted at HRI ‘26 — a full paper and a late-breaking report. |
| 03-10-2026 | Our HRI research featured in a CCI spotlight on student-led human-robot interaction work. |
| 02-13-2026 | My student Qian Yang received a UTK Graduate Student Research Award (Fall 2025)! |
| 01-07-2026 | Google Gemini Academic Program Award ($10,000 in Google Cloud credits) for AI-assisted research. |