Houji

Hi, My name is 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. My broad research interest focuses on Human-Centered AI and Design Research, with an emphasis on integrating human-centered principles into AI system design.

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

One central research focus is designing human-centered AI tools to protect information integrity. By collaborating with diverse stakeholders, such as journalists, fact-checkers, and the public, I help combat mis/disinformation and foster informed public discourse:

Design principles for human-centered NLP fact-checking (Liu et al. 2024, Das et al. 2023)
AI-assisted multidimensional claim prioritization (Liu et al. 2025)
Mitigate confirmation bias via LLM-generated multi-persona debate (Shi et al. 2024)

My recent research interest expands to AI-accelerated scientific discovery, investigating how using LLMs and agents might influence different research activities:

LLM impacts on scientific knowledge production (Xu et al. 2025)

My earlier work mainly focuses on service design for older adults:

Community service for older adults' tech literacy and nursing (Li et al. 2023, Liu et al. 2022, Liu et al. 2022)
Conversational agents for older adults' health (An et al. 2025)
Service design metrics (Chehade et al. 2023)

All research projects, Google Scholar

Updates

[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.

[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.