Zhihan JIANG

Postdoctoral Researcher
Columbia University
jiang-zh@outlook.com

Email Github Google Scholar LinkedIn X

News

  • Aug 2026: Paper on measuring depression-indicative self-disclosure in YouTube comments accepted to the WellComp Workshop @ UbiComp/ISWC 2026. Congrats to Rosemary!
  • Jul 2026: Paper From AI-as-Shortcut to AI-as-Partner accepted to the UbiComp/ISWC 2026 Education Forum. [pdf]
  • Jul 2026: Presented DietGlance at the Research Summit for Egocentric Intelligence with Project Aria, Meta Reality Labs Research.
  • Jun 2026: Invited talk at Southern University of Science and Technology, hosted by Prof. Lin Lin.
  • May 2026: Our tutorial on prototyping personal LLM health agents accepted to ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2026, with me as lead organizer. [website]
  • May 2026: Invited talk at the Human-Centered AI Lab, Northeastern University, hosted by Prof. Dakuo Wang.
  • Apr 2026: Paper on lightweight blockchain for federated lifelong learning in IoT accepted to IEEE Transactions on Networking. Congrats to Handi!
  • Apr 2026: πŸ† Best Poster Award at the Everyday Wearable for Health Workshop @ CHI 2026 for our smartwatch AI digital pet for cannabis use disorder support.
  • Mar 2026: Received the Google Cloud Research Credit Award.
  • Mar 2026: πŸ… Hear You in Silence and MindfulAgents both received Honorable Mention Awards at CHI 2026!
  • Feb 2026: Survey on causality and federated learning accepted to TKDD. Congrats to Jing!
  • Feb 2026: DietGlance, on dietary monitoring with AI glasses, accepted to ACM HEALTH.
  • Jan 2026: Paper on active listening with conversational agents conditionally accepted to CHI 2026. Thanks to Prof. RAY LC, Qianhui, Chu, and Lydia!
  • Jan 2026: Paper on multi-agent personalized mindfulness meditation conditionally accepted to CHI 2026. Congrats to Millie!
  • Dec 2025: Received the NVIDIA Academic Grant.
  • Oct 2025: Interdisciplinary paper on ultra-sensitive ion detection accepted to Advanced Functional Materials. Congrats to Ran and Prof. Zhao's team!
  • Aug 2025: Starting as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in Prof. Xuhai "Orson" Xu's SEA Lab!
  • Aug 2025: πŸŽ‰ Officially Dr. Jiang! Deep thanks to my PhD supervisor, Prof. Edith C.H. Ngai.
  • Jul 2025: NoteIt, converting instructional videos into interactable notes, accepted to UIST 2025.
  • Mar 2025: Paper on connectivity in complex directed networks accepted to IEEE TNSE. Congrats to Zhiyi and Lin!
  • Feb 2025: Paper on edge general intelligence accepted to IEEE Network. Congrats to Handi and Weipeng!
  • Dec 2024: Paper on continual learning for network intrusion detection accepted to INFOCOM 2025. Congrats to Xinchen!
  • Nov 2024: Feasibility study on diagnosing ADHD in adolescents with activity trackers accepted to JAACAP Open. Thanks to Adrienne and Prof. Wong's team!
  • Oct 2024: Paper on lightweight blockchain for federated learning accepted to IEEE TMC. Congrats to Handi!
  • Jul 2024: Received the HKU Foundation First Year Excellent PhD Award.
  • Jun 2024: Talk at Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two, HKU. [Poster]
  • Jun 2024: Paper on detecting false data injection attacks accepted to the Journal of the Franklin Institute. Congrats to Xinchen!
  • Apr 2024: Paper on an on-campus robot management system accepted to IMWUT 2024. Congrats to Yufei and Prof. Chen's team!
  • Jan 2024: Paper on cross-layer gradients for heterogeneous federated learning accepted to ICLR 2024. Congrats to Yun-Hin! [OpenReview]
  • Dec 2023: Paper on contrastive learning for intrusion detection accepted to INFOCOM 2024. Congrats to Xinchen!
  • Dec 2023: πŸ“’ Our school-closure health inference work featured by @HKUniversity. [Link]
  • Oct 2023: Presented HealthPrism at IEEE VIS 2023. [Demo]
  • Oct 2023: Presented at UbiComp 2023, my first international conference talk! [Presentation][Poster]
  • Sep 2023: Survey on wearable-based disease diagnosis accepted to IEEE IoTJ.
  • Aug 2023: Talk at MARS Group, Xiamen University.
  • Jul 2023: Paper on stochastic finite-field networks accepted to IEEE TCNS. Congrats to Lin and Prof. Lam!
  • Jul 2023: Paper on predicting emergency department queues with crowdsensing data accepted to IMWUT 2023. Congrats to Tieqi and Prof. Chen's team!
  • Jul 2023: HealthPrism, visual analytics of children's health, accepted to IEEE VIS 2023.
  • Jun 2023: Presented a poster at the Ambient AI Workshop @ ICASSP 2023.
  • May 2023: Passed my PhD probationary interview.
  • Jan 2023: Paper on children's health inference during school closures accepted to IMWUT 2023. Thanks to Prof. Ip's team!
  • Aug 2022: Paper on drivers' visual load in traffic violation hotspots accepted to IEEE TITS.
  • Aug 2022: Paper on COVID-19 high-risk populations in Hong Kong accepted to Healthcare. Thanks to Ka Man and Dr. So's team!
  • May 2022: Paper on bike-sharing demand modeling and rebalancing accepted to IEEE TMC. Congrats to Hang and Prof. Chen's team!
  • Feb 2022: Paper on personalized visual aids for appearance building products accepted to CHI 2022. Congrats to Chuhan and Prof. Ma!
  • Sep 2021: Attended UbiComp/ISWC 2021 (virtual).
  • Sep 2021: Started my PhD in Dr. Ngai's IoT Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, HKU.
πŸŽ“ Upcoming Tutorial @ UbiComp/ISWC 2026: I'm leading a hands-on tutorial on prototyping your personal LLM health agent, in Shanghai this October. Everyone is warmly welcome to attend! Learn more →

About Me

Hello, I'm Zhihan Jiang (θ’‹δΉ‹ζ™—), a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the SEA Lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Columbia University, working with Prof. Xuhai "Orson" Xu. Previously, I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Hong Kong (Advisor: Prof. Edith C.H. Ngai), and B.E./M.E. in Computer Science and Technology from Xiamen University (Advisor: Prof. Longbiao Chen).

My research journey began with mining heterogeneous spatiotemporal data to model large-scale urban dynamics, a body of work fundamentally about understanding people's behavior within complex urban environments. This human-centric perspective naturally extended my focus toward personal health and well-being.

Currently, I design and evaluate interactive AI systems for health and well-being. My work centers on human-AI co-sensemaking: how people and AI develop understanding together, with people remaining the authors of what they come to understand rather than passive recipients of what a model concludes. Drawing on multimodal sensing, interactive visual analytics, and generative AI, I build systems to bridge the gap between data-driven insights and evidence-informed action. My research spans ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), human-computer interaction (HCI), and health informatics.

I always welcome the opportunity for research collaboration and I'm eager to explore potential research ideas. If you're interested, please feel free to drop me an email.

Selected Publications [Click here to view the full list] [Google Scholar]

(* indicates equal contribution)

[CHI'26a] πŸ… Honorable Mention Award
Zhihan Jiang, Qianhui Chen, Chu Zhang, Yanheng Li, RAY LC.
Hear You in Silence: Designing for Active Listening in Human Interaction with Conversational Agents Using Context-Aware Pacing.
[website][arXiv]
[ACM HEALTH'26]
Zhihan Jiang*, Running Zhao*, Lin Lin, Yue Yu, Handi Chen, Xinchen Zhang, Xuhai Xu, Yifang Wang, Xiaojuan Ma, Edith CH Ngai.
DietGlance: Dietary Monitoring and Personalized Analysis at a Glance with Knowledge-Empowered AI Assistant.
[link][arXiv]
[CHI'26b] πŸ… Honorable Mention Award
Mengyuan Wu, Zhihan Jiang*, Yuang Fan*, Richard Feng, Sahiti Dharmavaram, Mathew Polowitz, Shawn Fallon, Bashima Islam, Lizbeth Benson, Irene Tung, David Creswell, Xuhai Xu.
MindfulAgents: Personalizing Mindfulness Meditation via an Expert-Aligned Multi-Agent System.
[website]
[UIST'25]
Running Zhao*, Zhihan Jiang*, Xinchen Zhang, Chirui Chang, Handi Chen, Weipeng Deng, Luyao Jin, Xiaojuan Qi, Xun Qian, Edith CH Ngai.
NoteIt: A System Converting Instructional Videos to Interactable Notes Through Multimodal Video Understanding.
[website][demo][arXiv]
[JAACAPOpen'24]
Zhihan Jiang*, Adrienne Y.L. Chan*, Dawn Lum, Kirstie HTY Wong, Janice CN Leung, Patrick Ip, David Coghill, Rosa S Wong, Edith C.H. Ngai, Ian C.K. Wong.
Wearable Signals for Diagnosing Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Adolescents: A Feasibility Study.
[link]
[IoTJ'23]
Zhihan Jiang, Vera van Zoest, Weipeng Deng, Edith C.H. Ngai, Jiangchuan Liu.
Leveraging Machine Learning for Disease Diagnoses based on Wearable Devices: A Survey.
[link][pdf]
[VIS'23]
Zhihan Jiang, Handi Chen, Rui Zhou, Jing Deng, Xinchen Zhang, Running Zhao, Cong Xie, Yifang Wang, Edith C.H. Ngai.
HealthPrism: A Visual Analytics System for Exploring Children's Physical and Mental Health Profiles with Multimodal Data.
[arXiv][demo][link][appendix]
[UbiComp'23]
Zhihan Jiang, Lin Lin, Xinchen Zhang, Jianduo Luan, Running Zhao, Longbiao Chen, James Lam, Ka Man Yip, Hung Kwan So, Wilfred HS Wong, Patrick Ip, Edith C.H. Ngai.
A Data-Driven Context-Aware Health Inference System for Children during School Closures.
[link][pdf][presentation][poster]
[CHI'22]
Chuhan Shi, Zhihan Jiang, Xiaojuan Ma, Qiong Luo.
A Personalized Visual Aid for Selections of Appearance Building Products with Long-term Effects.
[link][pdf]

Education

2021β€”2025Ph.D.The University of Hong Kong, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Edith C.H. Ngai, Faculty of Engineering
2018β€”2021M.E.Xiamen University, Computer Science & Technology
Advisor: Longbiao Chen, School of Informatics
2014β€”2018B.E.Xiamen University, Computer Science & Technology
School of Informatics
Minor Xiamen University, Mathematical Finance
 The Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics

Teaching & Tutorials

Conference Tutorials

  • Lead Organizer & Lecturer, From Multimodal Sensing Data to Actionable Health Insights: A Hands-on Guide to Prototyping Your Personal LLM Health Agent, ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2026, Shanghai. [website]

Teaching Assistant

  • COMP3234 / ELEC3443: Computer and Communication Networks, The University of Hong Kong (Fall 2021–2024)
  • Software Architecture and Design Patterns, Xiamen University (Spring 2019)

Service

Chair & Committee

  • Social Chair & Technical Program Committee @ WellComp Workshop, ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2026
  • Technical Program Committee @ EIoT Workshop, ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2026
  • Session Chair @ CHI 2026
  • Program Committee @ UbiComp/ISWC 2026 Poster Track

Journal Reviewer

  • [IMWUT] Proc. of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
  • [HEALTH] ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
  • [JMIR] Journal of Medical Internet Research
  • [TVCG] IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
  • [TAFFC] IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
  • [TMC] IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
  • [TITS] IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
  • [TII] IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
  • [TCE] IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics
  • [TCSS] IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
  • [JNCA] Journal of Network and Computer Applications
  • [IoTJ] IEEE Internet of Things Journal
  • [EAAI] Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Conference Reviewer

  • [VIS] IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics Conference, 2026
  • [UIST] The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 2026
  • [IUI] ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2026
  • [PacificVis] IEEE Pacific Visualization Conference, 2026
  • [IJCNN] International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 2025
  • [CHI] ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025
  • [TEI] ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2025
  • [INFOCOM] IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 2023-2025
  • [SenSys] ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2022-2025
  • [ICASSP] IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2024-2026
  • [ICDCS] IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 2022-2023
  • [IWQoS] IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Quality of Service, 2023
  • [UIC] IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, 2020-2022
  • [ChineseCSCW] Chinese Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2020
  • [ICC] IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2020