Jie (Sophia) Gao

Building a science of interpretive work across humans, autonomous agents, and their collaborations.

Beyond these three lines, I also work on other topics such as human-LLM interaction modes, AI-assisted writing, online deliberation, and messaging on smart glasses.

• [2026.07] 🔥 Happy to host the GLEE Competition at the IAB Workshop @NeurIPS 2026!
• [2026.07] 🔥 Organizing the IAB Workshop @NeurIPS 2026, on bringing interpretation methods from HCI and the social sciences to build interpretability for autonomous agents.
• [2026.06] 🎤 Gave a talk, “Toward Seeing What Agents Do: Interpretive Work in the Age of Agentic AI,” at Monash University
• [2026.05] 🎤 Gave a talk, “Toward Seeing What Agents Do: Interpretive Work in the Age of Agentic AI,” at Fudan University (News)
• [2026.05] Our preprint How to Interpret Agent Behavior is out! We introduce Act*ONOMY, a hierarchical taxonomy for analyzing autonomous agent behavior at runtime.
• [2026.04] 🎉 Our CodeMap paper received an award at ICPC 2026 (a CORE A conference in code comprehension)! 🏆 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

• [2026.04] 🎤 Happy to give a talk at NLP for Computational Social Science (Slides)
• [2026.04] 🎤 Happy to give a talk at Advanced HCI at JHU (Slides)
• [2026.03] 🎤 Gave a Claude Code How-To Session (Slides) for 40+ JHU researchers (Master's students, PhD students, postdocs, and faculty): covering practical usage and best practices of Claude Code and OpenClaw, provided live demos.
• [2025.12] 🎉 Our paper on supporting developers in understanding new codebases has been accepted to the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2026)! Check out the preprint: Understanding Codebase like a Professional! Human-AI Collaboration for Code Comprehension | CodeMap Website
• [2025.11] ✈️ I attended EMNLP2025 in Suzhou, China. We presented our position paper, From Noise to Nuance: Enriching Subjective Data Annotation through Qualitative Analysis on generalizing qualitative data analysis to subjective data annotation domain.
• [2025.10] ✈️ I attended VL/HCC 2025 conference in North Carolina. Met new friends and had a great time!
• [2025.10] 👩🏻‍💻 I am serving as an Associate Chair for CHI2026 under subcommittee Understanding People — Statistical and Quantitative Methods.
• [2025.05] ✈️ I attended CHI 2025 conference in Japan, and met a lot of old and new friends!
• [2025.04] 🌟 We introduce mindcoder.ai, a web application designed to support automated qualitative analysis. The user only needs to follow three steps to obtain qualitative analysis results-1) upload data, 2) start coding, and 3) get analysis report! See how to use-video.
• [2025.03] 🚀 Started my postdoc fellowship at Johns Hopkins University!
• [2024.12] 🚀 I will join the Malone postdoctoral fellow program at Johns Hopkins University next March! I will be working with Mark Dredze, Ziang Xiao and Chien-Ming Huang to explore the potential of LLM in qualitative analysis methodology usage in healthcare.
• [2024.09] 👩🏻‍💻 I am serving as an Associate Chair for CHI2025 under subcommittee "Understanding People — Statistical and Quantitative Methods" this year!
• [2024.05] ✈️ Attended CHI2024 and met old and new friends! I co-organized a workshop "LLMs as Research Tools".
• [2024.03] 🎉 Our Late-breaking Work "A Taxonomy for Human-LLM Interaction Modes-An Initial Exploration" has been accepted to CHI 2024.
• [2024.03] We have launched CollabCoder Website. Construction and refinement is ongoing!
• [2024.01] 🎉 One first-authored paper "CollabCoder" and one coauthored paper "Help Me Reflect" have been accepted to CHI2024! (Preprints will have minor refinements in final versions.)
• [2024.01] 🚀 I successfully defended my PhD thesis titled "Tool Support for Human-AI Collaboration in Qualitative Data Analysis".
• [2023.12] 🚀 We will organize a workshop "LLMs as Research Tools" at CHI2024, from 11-16 May 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
• [2023.12] 🚀 Starting from early 2024, I am excited to become a part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology as a Postdoctoral Researcher, where I will be mentored by Prof. Thomas W. Malone. I'm thrilled about this opportunity!
• [2023.12] 🚀 I attended EMNLP2023 at Singapore. Happy to learn many new things and friends!
• [2023.11] 🚀 Presented CollabCoder project in the Immersive Reality Lab at NUS. Thanks for the invitation from Prof Khoo Eng Tat!
• [2023.10] 🚀 Attended CSCW2023 and presented CollabCoder demo virtually! (due to visa and funding issues)
• [2023.08] 🎉 One coauthored paper "GlassMessaging" has been accepted to Ubicomp2023!
• [2023.06] 🎉 One coauthored paper has been accepted to ICSME2023!
• [2023.06] 🎉 One coauthored paper "VISAR" has been accepted to UIST2023!
• [2023.06] 🎉 One first-authored paper "CoAIcoder" has been accepted to TOCHI!
• [2023.06] 🎉 Our "CollabCoder" platform has been selected for a demo work at CSCW2023!
• [2023.01] 🚀 Excited to start as a visiting Ph.D. student at Notre Dame, working with Prof Toby's team!
• [2023.01] 👩🏻‍💻 Work as an associate chair for the Late-Breaking Work Committee of CHI2023.
• [2022.06] 🚀 Thrilled to begin as a visiting Ph.D. student at NUS-HCI lab, looking forward to collaborating with Prof Shen and the lab team!
• [2022.04] ✈️ Glad to attend CHI2022 in person in New Orleans, LA, USA. Thanks for the funding support from Simon.
• [2022.01] 👩🏻‍💻 Worked as an associate chair for the Late-Breaking Work Committee of CHI2022.

• [2026.12] NeurIPS 2026, Sydney, Australia
• [2026.10] EMNLP 2026, Budapest, Hungary
• [2026.10] COLM 2026, San Francisco, USA
• [2025.11] EMNLP 2025, Suzhou, China presenting
• [2025.10] VL/HCC 2025, North Carolina, USA
• [2025.04] CHI 2025, Yokohama, Japan
• [2024.05] CHI 2024, Honolulu, USA presenting

• [2023.12] EMNLP 2023, Singapore
• [2023.10] CSCW 2023, Minneapolis, USA (Virtual) presenting
• [2022.11] ESEC/FSE 2022, Singapore
• [2022.04] CHI 2022, New Orleans, USA (Hybrid) presenting
• [2018.10] UbiComp 2018, Singapore presenting

• [2026.06]
  “Toward Seeing What Agents Do: Interpretive Work in the Age of Agentic AI”

  Monash University
• [2026.05]
  “Toward Seeing What Agents Do: Interpretive Work in the Age of Agentic AI” (News)

  Fudan University
• [2026.04]
  “LLMs for Qualitative Data Analysis: Methods, Applications and Concerns” (Slides)

  Guest lecture at Advanced HCI, Johns Hopkins University
• [2026.04]
  “LLMs for Qualitative Data Analysis: Methods, Applications and Concerns” (Slides)

  Guest lecture at NLP for Computational Social Science, Johns Hopkins University
• [2026.03]
  “Claude Code How-To Session” (Slides)

  Tutorial for 40+ JHU researchers (Master’s students, PhD students, postdocs, and faculty)
• [2025.11]
  “Human–AI Collaboration for Complex Unstructured Data Analysis”

  Western Michigan University
• [2025.10]
  “From Automation to Human-AI Collaboration: Methods and Applications for Insights Extraction in Unstructured Data”

  Malone Center Research Lunch, Johns Hopkins University
• [2025.07]
  “AI for Text Production and Analysis”

  HCIX Research Club
• [2025.05]
  “AI for Qualitative Data Analysis”

  Public health course
• [2025.04]
  “Designing Human-AI Teams to Extract Insights from Unstructured Data”

  HCI Seminar, Johns Hopkins University
• [2025.03]
  “Human-Centric Software Engineering in the Era of Large Language Models”

  Singapore Management University
• [2025.02]
  “Extracting Insights from (Un)structured Data: Methods and Applications”

  M3S Seminar, Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICPC 2026
  A premier venue for program comprehension and software engineering research.
• Malone Postdoctoral Fellowship, Johns Hopkins University, 2024
• SUTD PhD Fellowship, 2019
• Excellent Graduate Student, Zhejiang University, 2019
• Excellent Undergraduate Student, Shanghai University, 2017
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship Scholarship, Shanghai University, 2016
• Leadership Scholarship, Shanghai University, 2016
• 3rd Prize, Shanghai Electronic Design Competition (Group Leader), 2016

• IAB Workshop, NeurIPS 2026 (Lead Organizer)
• “LLMs as Research Tools: Applications and Evaluations in HCI Data Work,” CHI 2024 Workshop (Co-organizer)

• ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Main Track
  • Associate Chair, 2027 (incoming)
  • Associate Chair, 2026
  • Associate Chair, Best Paper Committee, 2025
• ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Late-Breaking Work Track
  • Associate Chair, 2023
  • Associate Chair, 2022

• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026
• Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI), 2026
• International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (IJHCI), 2025
• Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2025
• ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2025
• Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 2025
• ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), 2024–2025
• ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023–2024 (transitioned to Associate Chair from 2024)
• ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2022–2023
• International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), 2023

I love building software that helps people solve real problems. I value reproducibility and open source. While maintaining these tools takes effort, I believe it supports real-world applications of research.