personal photo

Contact

liu.ho at utexas dot edu
1616 Guadalupe St., 5.520, Austin, TX, 78701

Lab & Affiliation

Research group:
AI & Human-Centered Computing

Associated research community:
UT NLP | Good System Mis/disinformation |
UT CosmicAI Institute

Hi, I'm Houjiang Liu ("Whole-jyahng Lyoo"), a doctoral candidate (2021 to present) at the School of Information, UT Austin. Currently, I am advised by professor Matthew Lease in the research group AI & Human-Centered Computing.

Previously, I was a design researcher in Center for Design at the Northeastern University, advised by professor Miso Kim on designing services grounded in autonomy and Paolo Ciuccarelli on visualizing interactive network graphs. I was also a part-time lecturer teaching Interaction Design in CAMD at Northeastern. Before my academic career, I was an Interaction Designer, working at JD.com (Beijing) and SeetaTech AI (Beijing).


Research Highlights

A major strand of my work involves collaborating with key stakeholders in the online information ecosystem, such as journalists, fact-checkers, and the public, to address mis/disinformation and foster informed public discourse:

More recently, I have expanded my interests to AI-accelerated scientific discovery, examining how large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents may shape research activities (Xu et al. 2025).

In addition, building on my prior work, I continue to investigate service design for older adults’ tech literacy and health (Li et al. 2023, Liu et al. 2022, Liu et al. 2022, An et al. 2025) and information visualization (Colombo et al. 2023, Li et al. 2022).


Updates

[11.2025] Led by Yinan from MIT SCL, our data visualization Biophilia: Mapping the Emotional Pulse of Urban Nature will be exhibited in the Biennial Information + Conference 2025. Location: MIT Media Lab East Lobby, November 14-16.

[03.2025] Honored to receive the UT Graduate Continuing Fellowship.

[02.2025] Our work on Exploring multidimensional checkworthiness is accepted at CSCW25. I will present the work at iSchools Doctoral Seminar Series in August and attend this year CSCW in October.

[01.2025] Successfully pass qualifying procedure and enter candidacy. Paper about Rhetorical XAI is uploaded arxiv25.

[11.2024] Our work on LLM multi-persona debates to reduce confirmation bias is presented at iSchool AI Showcase.

[11.2024] Our co-design paper on Human-centered NLP Fact-checking using Matchmaking for AI has been awarded honorable mention (top 4% submitted paper) at CSCW24.