About
I’m Nanjie (Jimmy) Rao; my papers use Nanjie Rao. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Human-Centered Computing at the University of Florida, in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. I work in the Embodied Learning & Experience (ELX) Lab, advised by Dr. Sharon Lynn Chu. I passed my oral defense in October 2026, and the Ph.D. is to be conferred in December 2026.
An AI system that adapts to a person must first know something about them, by asking or by reading records the person already produced. My research asks which to rely on, how accurate and well grounded the result is, and what it costs in privacy.
Before human-centered computing, I did doctoral coursework in electrical engineering at the University of Houston and Texas A&M University, after my undergraduate studies at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in China. I build hardware as well as software; see Builds.
Pronouns: he/him.
Talks
- Upcoming oral presentation at DTRUE 2026, UF Jacksonville campus, Nov 19–20, 2026.
- First-author presentations: HCI International (2021, 2022); IEEE ICALT (2021, 2023, 2026); ICIDS (2019); IEEE VR (2020).
Elsewhere
- Google Scholar: Publications and citations on Google Scholar
- GitHub: Code on GitHub (JimmyRaoUF)
- YouTube: YouTube channel “Dr. Lucky Dad - Research and Engineer the Dad Life”
- Zhihu (知乎): Writing in Chinese on Zhihu
Outside research
I’m a certified rank-2 master in Go (weiqi). I also enjoy ballroom dancing, soccer, and soccer esports games.