I direct the Human-AI Ecosystem (HAE!) Lab at USC, where a group of interdisciplinary researchers research, design, and build AI-powered technologies that account for humans' complex social dynamics and empower users in their situated ecosystems (e.g., professional domains, healthcare systems, and social networks). Here are some of the key projects that we work on at the moment:

1. Companion AI that connects users back to their support networks: Companionship is now one of the most common uses of generative AI. How do such AI uses become detrimental, and when do human interventions become necessary? Ultimately, how do we disengage users from harmful reliance on AI and reconnect them to existing human support within their personal and healthcare networks?
2. AI teammates that support positive group dynamics: AI now holds the agency not only to facilitate but also to participate in teams and groups. How do AI agents steer social interactions in groups and teams? How do we design agents that are more socially aware and support positive dynamics?
3. Collaborative AI tools that foreground human expertise: AI assistance at work holds unprecedented potential to democratize expertise across domains. How do we design AI tools that empower users while spotlighting the value of human work? How should workflows and AI use policies be framed to support this goal?

By keywords, here are some of the subjects that best capture the lab's interests:
#   human-AI collaboration
#   human-agent teamwork
#   societal impact of AI + scalable methods for HAII research
#   digital mental health
#   future of work

The lab is grateful for support from Google Research, Amazon Science, Slack, USC Annenberg, and USC Center on Generative AI & Society.

02/2026   Invited to attend CRA's Early Career Mentoring Workshop in DC.

01/2026   Looking forward to visitiing UCLA to give a colloquium talk!

12/2025   The call for ShowCAIS 2026 is out now! This is our 4th annual symposium at USC Center for AI in Society. We are looking forward to learning about everyone's latest work on AI for social good.

11/2025   Grateful to receive support from Amazon with Jieyu Zhao to research culturally aware AI in digital mental healthcare!

10/2025   Honored to receive Google's Academic Research Award!! Along with Munmun De Choudhury, we will work on idnetifying criticial cues that signals harmful interactions between users and AI companions and needs for human interventions.

Spring 2026   Honored to be an invited keynote at UC Davis' Comm Horizons Conference

10/2025   Glad to be a part of the SESP symposium on trust paradox and synthetic data/content in the age of generative AI - lead by DongWon Oh along with Juliana Schroeder and Harry Yan.

10/2025   Giving a talk at USC's CS Research Colloquium.

10/2025   Attending 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society at Georgia Tech.

10/2025   Attending CSCW 2025 in Bergen, Norway! I will present our work on authenticity in co-writing with LLMs, chair sessions on health and crisis, participate in the PosiTech Workshop, and co-organize another panel on LLMs as research tools with Marianne Aubin Le Quéré and Hope Schroeder.

10/2025   Attending CSCW NE. Excited to be back on the East Coast!

09/2025   Attending Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference for the first time!

09/2025   Another year serving as CHI's AC. Looking forward to working with the Interaction Beyond the Individual subcommittee.

09/2025   Gave another talk at MASTS. This is my third semester participating in this group, and it remains one of my favorite on campus :) It's also a great pleasure to co-lead MASTS with Mike Ananny, Colin Maclay, and Chris O'Neill, featuring "sensing" as MASTS' theme this year.

09/2025   I gave a talk and participated in the Data Ethics in Health AI panel at the Responsible Data workshop series.

Fall 2025   Starting my role as Associate Director at USC Center for AI in Society.

08/2025   Serving as program committee for CSCW'26.

07/2025   Our work examining large-scale data across two major freelance and creator platforms (Upwork and Bēhance) shows that creators who declare the use of AI receive significantly lower pay, but those who work on non-creative job functions earn more when labeling themselves as "AI Pros." I will present this work at the Annual Meeting of Academy of Management (AOM) and International Conference on Computational Social Science (ic2s2). See extended abstract here.

06/2025   Qian Yang (Cornell IS), Tanzeem Choudhury (Cornell Tech), Fei Wang (Weill Cornell Medicine), and I co-organize the inaugural Thought Summit on AI in Mental Health. This week-long event brings together experts from computer science, HCI, clinical health, and health policy to jointly discuss the new frontier of digital mental health.

06/2025   Gina Do (IBM Research), Molly Feldman (Oberlin), Jessica He (IBM Research), Seyun Kim (CMU) and I co-organized a workshop on disclosure, ownership, and accountability of AI use at CHIWORK. See full details on the workshop website.

05/2025   Attending Global AI Initiative's LLM and Society Thought Summit.

05/2025   I will lead a session on (de)valuation of AI-assisted work in the online labor market in an upcoming workshop series on "What is work worth?" at Data & Society.

04/2025   Organized a panel on "Human Subjects Research in the Age of Generative AI" at CHI'25 in Yokohama, Japan.

04/2025   Honored to receive Annenberg Dean's Research Award!