Yun Huang

Associate Professor

PhD, Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine

Other professional appointments

  • Faculty Affiliate, Department of Computer Science
  • Faculty Affiliate, Illinois Informatics
  • Faculty Affiliate, Siebel Center for Design

Research focus

Human-computer interaction, social computing, mobile computing, computer-supported cooperative work, human-AI interaction, conversational agents, social media, and crowdsourcing.

Honors and Awards

  • Linowes Faculty Fellowship, the Cline Center, University of Illinois, 2024-2025
  • Awardee of OpenAI Researcher Access Program (2024)
  • 2024-2025 Emerging Research Leaders Academy at the Illinois Institute for Health Sciences and Technology 
  • Co-Investigator of an OpenAI project (2023)
  • Co-Investigator of an NSF-led AI Institute (2023)
  • Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Early Career Development Grant (2022)
  • Teacher Ranked as Excellent, University of Illinois (Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2023)
  • NSF CRII award 
  • Google Faculty Research Award
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention at the ACM CHI Conference
  • NSF I-Corps Award
  • iConference Best Paper Award

Biography

Yun Huang is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She co-directs the Social Computing Systems (SALT) Lab. Before joining Illinois, she was a faculty member in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and a postdoc fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work focuses on social computing systems research, in which she examines context-driven approaches of designing crowdsourcing systems. For example, her research examines how different contexts impact user contributions to crowdsourcing systems; how to leverage these contextual effects to design innovative social computing systems that can better engage users; and how crowdsourced user behavioral data may help better understand users and the community. She received her PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her bachelor's degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China.

Office hours

By appointment, please contact professor

Publications & Papers

 

Si Chen, Haocong Cheng, Jason Situ, Desiree Kirst, Saumya Malhotra, Lawrence Angrave, Qi Wang, Yun Huang. 2024. Towards Inclusive Video Commenting: Introducing Signmaku for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2024.

Yiren Liu, Si Chen, Haocong Chen, Mengxia Yu, Xiao Ran, Andrew Mo, Yiliu Tang, and Yun Huang. 2024. CoQuest: Exploring Research Question Co-Creation with an LLM-based Agent. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24).

Felicia Fang-Yi Tan, Peisen Xu, Ashwin Ram, Wei Zhen Suen, Shengdong Zhao, Yun Huang, Christophe Hurter. 2024. AudioXtend: Assisted Reality Visual Accompaniments for Audiobook Storytelling During Everyday Routine Tasks. In  Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’24).

Chi-Hsien Yen, Haocong Cheng, Yilin Xia, Yun Huang (2023), CrowdIDEA: Blending Crowd Intelligence and Data Analytics to Empower Causal Reasoning, The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2023.

Yiren Liu, Ryan Mayfield, and Yun Huang (2023), Discovering the Hidden Facts of User-Dispatcher Interactions via Text-based Reporting Systems for Community Safety,  In Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), CSCW 2023.

Zheng Qingxiao, Shengyang Xu, Lingqing Wang, Yiliu Tang, Rohan Salvi, Guo Freeman, and Yun Huang (2023): "Understanding Safety Risks and Safety Design in Social VR Environments." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

Si Chen, Xinyue Chen, Yun Huang, Zhicong Lu (2022): "My Culture, My People, My Hometown" Chinese Ethnic Minorities Seeking Cultural Sustainability by Video Blogging, In Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), CSCW, 2023.

Bhavya, Si Chen, Zhilin Zhang, Wenting Li, Chengxiang Zhai, Lawrence Angrave, Yun Huang (2022), Exploring Collaborative Caption Editing to Augment Video-based Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development. 2022

Jiaxiong Hu, Yun Huang, Xiaozhu Hu, Yingqing Xu (2022): The Acoustically Emotion-aware Conversational Agent with Speech Emotion Recognition and Empathetic Responses, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 2022

Qingxiao Zheng, Yiliu Tang, Yiren Liu, Weizi Liu, and Yun Huang (2022): UX Research on Conversational Human-AI Interaction: A Literature Review of the ACM Digital Library. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2022.

Qingxiao Zheng, Daniela M Markazi, Yiliu Tang, Yun Huang (2021): "PocketBot is like a knock-on-the-door!": Designing a Chatbot for Supporting Long Distance Relationships. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), CSCW, 2021.

Chi-Hsien Yen, Haocong Cheng, Grace Yu-Chun Yen, Brain P Bailey, Yun Huang (2021), Narratives + Diagrams: An Integrated Approach for Externalizing and Sharing People’s Causal Beliefs. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), CSCW, 2021.

Shufan Ming, Ryan Mayfield, Haocong Cheng, Ke-Rou Wang, Yun Huang (2021): Examining Interactions Between Community Members and University Safety Organizations through Community-Sourced Risk Systems, in Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), CSCW, 2021.

 

Presentations

Yun Huang, Towards Building the Mobile Crowdsourcing Genome, School of Information, University of Michigan, 2019.

Yun Huang, Qunfang Wu, Yaxing Yao: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons Alone Didn't Work!, the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (Ubicomp 2018).

Qunfang Wu, Yisi Sang, Shan Zhang, Yun Huang: Danmaku vs. Forum Comments: Understanding User Participation and Knowledge Sharing in Online Videos, the 25th ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 2018.

Yun Huang, Yifeng Huang, Na Xue, Jeffery Bigham (2017): Leveraging Complementary Contributions of Different Workers for Efficient Crowdsourcing of Video Captions. the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI 2017).

Yun Huang, Crowdsourcing for Community Engagement, School of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing China, 2017.

Yun Huang, Brian Dobreski, Huichuan Xia: Human Library: Understanding Experience Sharing as a Participatory Service. the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017).

Yun Huang, Data-Driven Approaches to Understanding Community Policing on Social Media Platforms, the 2nd International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2016) Conference, Chicago, IL.

Yun Huangm, Municipal Police Departments on Facebook: What Are They Posting and Are People Engaging?, The 17th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Society (DG.O 2016) Conference, Shanghai, China.

Yun Huang, Modeling Sharing Decision of Campus Safety Reports and Its Design Implications to Mobile Crowdsourcing for Safety, the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Copenhagen (MobileHCI), Denmark.

Yun Huang, Emotion Map: A Mobile Social System for Improving Emotion Awareness and Regulation, CSCW 2015 Conference, Vancouver, Canada.