Curriculum vitae

Education

• Ph.D., Human-Centered Computing, University of Florida (Aug 2018 – Dec 2026)
  • Dissertation: Toward Scalable Interest-Based Learning: Comparing Data Sources for AI-Based Automated Identification of Students’ Personal Interests.
  • Committee: Sharon Lynn Chu (chair), Juan E. Gilbert, Lisa Anthony, Pavlo Antonenko.
• Doctoral coursework, Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University (Jan 2017 – May 2018)
• Doctoral coursework, Electrical Engineering, University of Houston (Aug 2016 – Dec 2016)
• Bachelor’s degree, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China (Sep 2012 – Jun 2016)
  • Outstanding Thesis Award (top 1% of undergraduates): Humanoid Robot Behavior Imitation System.

Research

• Where should an AI tutor’s knowledge of a student’s interests come from?
• Grounding: checking what models assert about people
• Civic AI: crowd-sourced urban digital twins
• Embodied and creative learning
• Teacher support technologies

Publications

Refereed conference papers

1. Rao, N., Lanzino, A., Chenore, R., Adhikari, I., Brown, S. A., Quek, F., & Chu, S. L. (2026). Hands as Narrators: Characterizing Idea Reuptake from Hand Enactment in Story Writing. ICIDS 2026, Springer. Full paper, accepted.
2. Rao, N., Huang, Z., Kulkarni, A., Ragan, E., & Chu, S. L. (2026). Identifying Student Interests for Interest-Based Learning: A Comparison of Interest Extraction from Browsing History and Social Media Posts. IEEE ICALT 2026. Full paper.
3. Kulkarni, A., Powell, L., Murphy, S., Rao, N., & Chu, S. L. (2023). Everyday-Inspired Movies: Towards the Design of Movie Recommender Systems Based on Everyday Life through Personal Social Media. IFIP INTERACT 2023, Springer, pp. 160–169.
4. Rao, N., Li, Q., Murphy, S., & Chu, S. L. (2023). The Context for Contextualizing: Design Implications for Adaptive Teacher Support Systems for More Relevant Instruction. IEEE ICALT 2023, pp. 71–73.
5. Rao, N., & Chu, S. L. (2021). Enhancing the Visual Efficiency for Communicating Students’ Personal Relevant Information. IEEE ICALT 2021. Best Short Paper Nomination.
6. Rao, N., Chu, S. L., & Chenore, R. (2021). Flexible Low-Cost Digital Puppet System. HCI International (HCII 2021), Springer LNCS.
7. Li, Q., Chu, S. L., Rao, N., & Nourani, M. (2020). Understanding the Effects of Explanation Types and User Motivations on Recommender System Use. AAAI HCOMP 2020.
8. Zarei, N., Chu, S. L., Quek, F., Rao, N. J., & Brown, S. A. (2020). Investigating the Effects of Self-Avatars and Story-Relevant Avatars on Children’s Creative Storytelling. ACM CHI 2020.
9. Rao, N., Chu, S. L., Faris, R. W., & Ospina, D. (2019). The Effects of Interactive Emotional Priming on Storytelling: An Exploratory Study. ICIDS 2019, Springer, pp. 395–404.

Extended abstracts, posters, and workshop papers

1. Rao, N., Chu, S. L., Jing, Z., Kuang, H., Tang, Y., & Dong, Z. (2022). Exploring Information Retrieval for Personalized Teaching Support. HCI International 2022 — Late Breaking Posters, Springer, pp. 191–197.
2. Rao, N., Zhang, L., Chu, S. L., Jurczyk, K., Candelora, C., Su, S., & Kozlin, C. (2020). Investigating the Necessity of Meaningful Context Anchoring in Augmented Reality Smart Glasses Interaction for Everyday Learning. IEEE VR 2020. Workshop paper and poster.

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).

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, UF CISE (Aug 2018 – present)

• COP 3530 Data Structures & Algorithms (Fall 2026): Weekly discussion sections for about 150 students in total; office hours in person and on Zoom at the same time.
• CIS 4360 Computer & Information Security (Spring 2026): Grading cycles; built a Canvas API gradebook workflow.
• CAP 5100 Human-Computer Interaction and CAP 5108 Research Methods (graduate, co-taught): Lectures, office hours, rubric design, and course-development feedback to faculty.
• Programming class sessions and tutoring: Taught programming class sessions; one-on-one tutoring in office hours.
• English teacher (part-time) in an after-school program during my undergraduate studies: a class of six elementary-school students for a year and a half.
• Tutor in English, mathematics, and science for elementary, middle, and high school students (2012–2016).

Mentoring and leadership

• ELX Lab: onboarded and mentored graduate and undergraduate research assistants in qualitative coding, inter-rater reliability, mixed-methods design, and documentation.
• Founder and team lead, Galaxy Studio (HUST, 2012–2016), a student hardware/software studio: 8 national and 21 university-level awards; PI on a national-grant undergraduate project.

Honors

• CISE Gartner Group Graduate Fellowship, four times (2021–2024)
• Best Short Paper Nomination, IEEE ICALT 2021
• Semifinalist, ANA Avatar XPRIZE (2021)
• Outstanding Thesis Award (top 1%), HUST, 2016

Skills

XR, sensing, teleoperation

Unity 3D (C#) with external tracking input via a Python bridge; AR smart-glasses apps (Vuzix Blade, Android); YOLO; IMUs (micro:bit, Aimxy); Leap Motion; Kinect; motion-capture teleoperation (NVIDIA Jetson); Tobii Pro Glasses 3; WebGazer.js

AI/ML

PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, OpenCV; LLM pipelines (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini) with structured outputs, retrieval, tool use; sentence-transformer embeddings; grounding audits

Data and study design

Python (pandas, statsmodels), R, SQL; GEE, multilevel models, ANCOVA, bootstrap/jackknife, Holm and Benjamini–Hochberg control; inter-rater reliability; MAXQDA, Taguette; Qualtrics, MTurk; IRB protocols

Software and hardware

TypeScript/JavaScript (React), Node.js, Flask, Java/Android, C/C++, C#; Docker Compose, Git; microcontrollers (TI, micro:bit, Jetson), PCB CAD, FPGA, soldering, 3D printing