Curriculum vitae

Education

1. Ph.D., Emerging Design and Informatics

   The University of Tokyo

   Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies · IIS Lab

   Apr 2026 – present Tokyo

2. M.S., Computer Science

   University of Southern California

   Viterbi School of Engineering · general Computer Science track

   2023 Los Angeles

3. Foundation in Art and Design (parallel to the M.S.)

   Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games & Animation

   Concept art, sculpture, 3D modeling and rendering

   2022 Hollywood

4. B.S., Computer Science

   University of California, Davis

   Minor in Japanese

   2021 Davis

Languages: Chinese (native) · English (proficient) · Japanese (advanced)

Positions

1. Research Assistant

   Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL)

   Member of the Cybernetic Humanity Studio (Sony CSL and OIST, led by Shunichi Kasahara). Society with AI Symbionts: the Miraikan project (AI science communicators that learn with the people they are modeled on; 2026 Good Design Award to the project) and a follow-up project at Sony CSL.

   Jul 2026 – present

2. Research Assistant

   USC Interaction Lab (Prof. Maja Matarić)

   Designed and built the robot's full LLM dialogue system, supervised every field session in the retirement homes, and developed new methods for assessing task outcomes and analysing the data (CHI '25).

   2024 – 2025

3. Art Lead & Technical Artist

   USC Games advanced game project and indie teams

   Led an art team of 20; art guidelines and pipeline, stylized dithering shaders in Unity, Houdini HDAs for destruction and environments, a sketch-to-terrain pipeline with Stable Diffusion, a texture-atlas tool in C#.

   2022 – 2023

4. Software Development Engineer Intern

   Alibaba Group, Hangzhou

   Business analytics visualization interface in React with the R&D team; migration of the legacy SQL database to the new platform.

   Jul – Sep 2019

5. Undergraduate Researcher

   HCI / visualization lab, UC Davis

   Built an NSF-funded network visualization tool (Vue, WebGL, SQLite) for social scientists working with their own data, with a WebGL rendering package and undo/redo history.

Publications

1. Promoting Cognitive Health in Elder Care with Large Language Model-Powered Socially Assistive Robots

   Maria R. Lima, Amy O'Connell, Feiyang Zhou, Alethea Nagahara, Avni Hulyalkar, Anura Deshpande, Jesse Thomason, Ravi Vaidyanathan, Maja J. Matarić. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan. doi:10.1145/3706598.3713582

   CHI ’252025

Abstracts, figures and BibTeX →