IAA Lab · Monash University

About Monash University

Woodside Building for Technology and Design at Monash University, Clayton campus
Photo by Monash Information Technology, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Monash University is a public research university in Melbourne, Australia, and a member of the Group of Eight, the country's research-intensive universities. It is ranked #31 globally in the 2027 QS World University Rankings. On CSRankings it is #7 in HCI worldwide (2010-2026), and #1 in Australia in all four of AI, NLP, software engineering, and HCI.

Interpretive Agentic AI Lab (IAA Lab)

IAA Lab (Interpretive Agentic AI Lab) studies how to help people understand, build, evaluate, and use AI agents more effectively. Our goal is to support agent developers, trainers, evaluators, and end users in developing better agent systems, training better models, and interacting with agents. Specifically, we support them in evaluating, monitoring, visualizing, debugging, and overseeing agents, as well as empirically analyzing agent trajectories to identify behaviors and derive insights that inform model training and improvement. Downstream use cases include agent systems for scientific discovery, dynamic workflows, and organizational collaboration.

As a cross-disciplinary team, we bring together perspectives from the AI, HCI, social sciences, and software engineering. We especially welcome students from these backgrounds. Students with other strong backgrounds are also welcome to contact us.

Open Positions

PhD Students (1-2)Starting mid to late 2027 or early 2028

I will accept students via PhD scholarships below. I may also be able to fund exceptionally strong students directly, depending on grant funding at the time. Please see How to apply and the Graduate Research Admissions Procedure. International students must also satisfy the English language requirements.

Visiting Students

I personally benefited a lot from my own visiting experience, in which I learned other labs' research methods and gained access to their alumni networks. So IAA Lab will welcome visiting students. I also encourage our students to visit other labs in other countries, and to have one or more internships in industry or another research lab. This ensures our students are more competitive on the job market in their graduating year, whether they are looking for academic or industry positions. If you want to visit IAA Lab, please contact me.

Interns

We welcome interns both remotely and locally.

How to Reach Out

When you email me, please include:

  • Your CV.
  • Which position you are interested in, and when you would want to start.
  • A short paragraph on what you want to work on and why it connects to the lab.

jgao77(at)jh.edu