I am a Ph.D. student specializing in Educational Technology at the University of California, Irvine, where I am advised by Dr. Mark Warschauer and Dr. Penelope Collins. I also work closely with Dr. Ying Xu from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining UCI, I completed my master’s at Harvard Graduate School of Education, advised by Dr. Catherine Snow.
My research explores the intersection of child-computer interaction and education, with a focus on creating innovative conversational interfaces to support children’s learning by leveraging AI technologies. I am currently working on an NSF-funded project, in partnership with PBS KIDS, focusing on the development and evaluation of conversational science narrative videos to promote children’s STEM learning. Simultaneously, I am developing a bilingual conversational agent integrated into culturally engaging e-books, aiming to support parent-child joint engagement in reading.
As a mixed-methods researcher, I combine lend design-based implementation research with experimental designs to innovate in the educational technology space. My work involves collaborating with young children and their families to design engaging, accessible conversational interfaces tailored to young learners’ needs. Concurrently, I design experiments to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of these tools, combining qualitative insights from the design phase with quantitative outcomes from the experiments. This approach not only assesses the impact of these interfaces on learning but also uncovers the mechanisms behind their success.
In my research, I actively collaborate with children and parents from diverse language, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, ensuring that the conversational interfaces are inclusive to users from various communities.
News
Paper on Home Study of Bilingual Conversational Agent Accepted to CHI 24
My paper – A Home Study of Parent-Child Co-Reading with a Bilingual Conversational Agent – was accepted to CHI’24 Late-Breaking Work…
Poster on Conversational AI and Children’s Learning Accepted to CDS Conference
My poster – Artificial Intelligence Enhances Children’s Science Learning from Television Shows by Boosting their Response to Questions of High Cognitive Demand – was accepted to the Cognitive Development and Society Conference…
IDC 2023 Best Paper Award on Developing a Bilingual Conversational Agent for Shared Reading
Our paper “Rosita Reads With My Family: Developing A Bilingual Conversational Agent to Support Parent-Child Shared Reading” won the Best Paper Award at the Interaction Design and Children Conference this year…
CHI Workshop Paper on Leveraging LLMs to Design Conversational Agents for Young Children
My extended abstract about leveraging large language models to improve the design of conversational agents for young children’s learning was accepted to CHI 23 Workshop on Child-centered AI…
AERA 2023 Paper Presentation on Developing a Bilingual Conversational Agent
Our paper presentation “Developing a Bilingual Dialogic Ebook with a Conversational Agent for Hispanic Families” was accepted by AERA 2023…