ph.d. student @Cornell | working on #HCI Human-AI Interaction | prev. @GoogleDeepMind @Adobe @Microsoft @ZJU_China | he/him | proud #firstgen
New York, USA
Joined March 2022
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Excited to share 𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘒𝘦𝘺𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨, a new interaction technique for AI-assisted creative writing! #UIST2026
It’s inspired by a familiar idea from animation: 𝘬𝘦𝘺𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨. (1/5)
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
We live in a vast digital universe with billions of websites, services, and applications. Yet, we’ve always been visitors, subscribers, and users,
and never the * owners *.
What if we can create our own information universe, one that holds our own data, understands us, and evolves with us?
We have been building Aware, a united place for the internet, your materials, and your agents. This clip shows how you can turn a tab into your *own* tab.
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
I wrote about my experience on the industry job market as a PhD student in an AI-adjacent field (HCI): kjfeng.me/blog/industry-job-…. If you’re wrapping up your PhD, didn’t focus on LLM training, and thinking about industry jobs, this one’s for you!
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
There is widespread frustration about the AI industry’s “automate everything" agenda. But what would it take to steer AI toward augmenting human capabilities instead? In a new essay, Gabriel Unger (@_gabrielunger) and I lay out a research agenda and plan for action. normaltech.ai/p/steering-ai-…
Our thesis is that the reason why AI-for-automation currently dominates isn’t just economic incentives but also deeper cultural issues in computer science as a field. And that can be changed.
- We sketch four important research directions that are needed in order to build collaborative or augmentative AI. The automation paradigm largely ignores these technical challenges.
- We advocate for Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Centered AI to be elevated as a subfield in status, influence, and funding, and changing AI curricula to emphasize the role of the human and decrease the centrality of the pure-automation problem framing.
- We point out that there are a surprising number of efforts in economics, computer science, industry, and policy all trying to bring about a shift toward augmentation, but not enough collective awareness. Better connecting these movements would amplify their power.
- We think the automation agenda is struggling on its own terms. Compiling evidence of the limits of general-purpose agents for automation and loudly making the case will encourage more companies to take collaboration more seriously as a goal.
- We predict that once more workers experience this way of working and recognize that there are alternatives to the delegate-and-supervise pattern, it will generate more demand, creating a flywheel effect.
- Targeted policy levers can play a small but important role in amplifying both the supply and demand for pro-worker AI. We don’t need clumsy top-down mandates.
We're not against automation. But we think the goal of AI must be broader.
This is the start of a long-term project. I know there are far more like-minded efforts out there than we’re aware of. I’d love to hear about some of them.
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
We’re excited to announce the inaugural Human–AI Interaction Conference (HAIC 2027), taking place June 27–30, 2027, in Washington, DC (CFP coming soon at haic.cc). HAIC focuses on translational impact, turning human–AI research into meaningful real-world impact.
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
📣 I’m on the job market for tenure-track faculty and industry research positions! I’m also excited to share that I’ll be joining Anthropic as a Research Fellow this November to work on AI safety and alignment.
(1/n, Reposts appreciated!)
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
Students sometimes ask me if it still makes sense, in this accelerating age, to pursue a PhD in AI.
Perhaps counterintuitively, I think it's a great time to do so.
I wrote up some thoughts on this here: web.mit.edu/phillipi/www/wri…
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
Eric's messages may exaggerate a bit and be a bit misleading, but I agree with the direction he is taking: that traditional Graphical UI (GUI) is on the decline.
But UIs are not going away, it how we interact with both the physical and digital worlds. As long as there is information transmission, there is a UI.
If we consider user interface modalities broadly- visual/graphical, language, gestural, etc-we are clearly going through a shift from heavy reliance on GUI to language-driven UIs. No single modality will take over or entirely go away, but the redistribution is real, and GUI is on the decline.
Within GUI, WIMP (btw, P stands for pointer or pointing devices, not pull down as Eric said) UI is being impacted the most.
We need to think about non-traditional, non-WIMP GUIs. Most of the human-agent interfaces, even though generated, are still a continuation of WIMP, IMHO.
User interfaces are not going away.
Yes, humans will use computers alongside agents. When working with agents, we will need the ability to audit what agents do in a human-readable way.
Yes, some interfaces (ex: dashboards, in-chat UI for ephemeral tasks, etc) will be generated. Most important interfaces will be intentionally designed. We will want both deterministic and non-deterministic interfaces in different situations. We're thinking a lot about the best ways to help designers shape non-deterministic systems at Figma.
Yes, new input modalities like voice, VR/AR and BCI will change the way we use computers and introduce lots of new interaction paradigms. This is all very exciting :)
Overall, the surface area of design will continue to grow much broader. Design is the new code and the key differentiator for software moving forward. Expect more and more energy to go into design / craft in the years ahead... it will be how you win or lose.
Eric is right about plenty of things, but the market will prove him wrong on this one...
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
User interfaces are not going away.
Yes, humans will use computers alongside agents. When working with agents, we will need the ability to audit what agents do in a human-readable way.
Yes, some interfaces (ex: dashboards, in-chat UI for ephemeral tasks, etc) will be generated. Most important interfaces will be intentionally designed. We will want both deterministic and non-deterministic interfaces in different situations. We're thinking a lot about the best ways to help designers shape non-deterministic systems at Figma.
Yes, new input modalities like voice, VR/AR and BCI will change the way we use computers and introduce lots of new interaction paradigms. This is all very exciting :)
Overall, the surface area of design will continue to grow much broader. Design is the new code and the key differentiator for software moving forward. Expect more and more energy to go into design / craft in the years ahead... it will be how you win or lose.
Eric is right about plenty of things, but the market will prove him wrong on this one...
"User interfaces are largely going to go away.
Because the agents speak English, or other languages. You can talk to them. You can say what you want. The UI can be generated.
So I can say, generate me a set of buttons that allows me to solve this problem, and it's generated for you."
- Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google.
Today’s websites are designed for humans, with carefully crafted UIs.
But we are probably moving towards UI-less web.
automated bot traffic has already surpassed human activity on the web. with AI agents, this number will explode.
In near future its very plausible that 90% or more of web traffic will be non-human.
Imagine a web with no websites. All your favorite apps are now just databases, queried for information by agents that zip around on your behest.
In a world primarily composed of bots, what happens to websites? Do agents learn to navigate them like a human? Do they go away entirely? 🤔
---
Video from 'Peter H. Diamandis' YT channel
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
Super interesting paper on proactive agents from Google DeepMind.
(bookmark it)
Proactive assistance usually means autocomplete.
Researchers asks what it looks like when an agent offers higher-level cognitive support and picks its own moment to speak.
They built a probe and deployed it with 16 participants for a week. Writers create partners by configuring a role and a proactivity level, and relevant partners then take initiative as the writing happens.
Three findings stand out:
> Participants configured support prospectively, planning for situations they anticipated rather than reacting to interruptions.
> They used suggestions for idea generation and also for self-monitoring, which is a purpose proactive tools rarely design for.
> And they judged intrusiveness by presentation, valuing lightweight visual representation and non-directive rhetorical framing.
The design implications cover customization, timing, engagement and representation.
Worth reading if you are building an assistant that acts before being asked, because how the intervention is phrased mattered to users as much as when it arrived.
Paper: academy.dair.ai/papers/desig…
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
AI in creative writing raises a lot of complicated questions, including what meaningful human creative control should look like. Our #UIST2026 paper on Narrative Keyframing led by @zhangchaodesign explores this with inspiration from classic automation strategies used in animation
Excited to share 𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘒𝘦𝘺𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨, a new interaction technique for AI-assisted creative writing! #UIST2026
It’s inspired by a familiar idea from animation: 𝘬𝘦𝘺𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨. (1/5)
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
Huge news—we got an NSERC Alliance grant to fund evalstats, prompt optimization, and ChainForge-related projects!! 🥳 This has been a long time coming. If you’re looking to do a research Masters or PhD in these topics, reach out!
Narrative Keyframing offers a more adaptable and transparent way to write creatively with AI, giving writers fine-grained control over what matters while using AI to help connect the dots. (4/5)
Narrative Keyframing for Generative Creative Writing
Project: keyframing.chaozhang.design
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2608.10337
This work is in collaboration with my wonderful Ph.D. advisor, @AbeDavis. (5/5)
Chao Zhang 张超 retweeted
@contralabs_ai is hiring research scientists on ai eval and data!
looking for folks who:
> get frustrated to see Fraunces all the time
> know what a GPT restaurant menu looks like and want to fix it
> love to sit down with data for hours
apply in thread
🎉 𝙈𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 accepted to #UIST2026!
Turn arbitrary words in your prompt into GUI controls to precisely steer LLM generation.
The flexibility of natural language, with the precision of GUI control.
Wonderful collaboration with @yirenl2 @flitternie @jeffrz @YunHuang_HCI @tal_august
See you at #UIST2026 in Detroit!
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2604.10925
