PhD Candidate, School of Data Science, Fudan University
Research: LLM-driven interactive agents, human-AI collaborative decision-making, intelligent visual analytics
Incoming Postdoctoral Researcher, ELLIS Institute Finland
My research focuses on LLM-driven intelligent visual analytics and human-AI collaboration. I combine methods from Visualization, Artificial Intelligence, and Human-Computer Interaction to build intelligent interfaces that help people understand complex data, coordinate with AI agents, and make decisions in open-ended analytical workflows.
Positions
Aug 2026–ELLIS Institute Finland / Aalto UniversityEspoo, Finland
Postdoctoral Researcher, ELLIS Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship
Supervisor: Prof. Antti Oulasvirta.
Jul–Sep 2023Huawei 2012 Laboratories, Central Software InstituteShanghai, China
Research Intern
Developed LLM-agent-based data analysis methods and systems for complex scenarios such as spatiotemporal situation awareness and business intelligence, supporting task-intent understanding, analysis planning, tool use, and human-in-the-loop decision-making.
Nov 2021–Jun 2022FDUVIS Lab, School of Data Science, Fudan UniversityShanghai, China
Research Assistant
Developed social media visual analytics systems, including temporal topic modeling, text comparison, and immersive 3D/VR visual analytics systems.
Jul–Sep 2020BGI Genomics, Bioinformatics Algorithm GroupShenzhen, China
Research Intern
Designed and implemented algorithms for detecting different types of genomic structural variants from next-generation sequencing data.
Education
2022–2026Ph.D. in Statistics, School of Data Science, Fudan UniversityShanghai, China
Advisor: Prof. Siming Chen. Dissertation: LLM-driven intelligent visual analytics.
2025–2026Visiting Ph.D. Student, School of Informatics, University of EdinburghEdinburgh, UK
Advisor: Prof. Benjamin Bach. Supported by the China Scholarship Council.
2020–2021M.S. in Data-driven Modeling, The Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyHong Kong, China
Advisor: Prof. Michael K. Y. Wong. First Class Honors.
2016–2020B.S. in Information and Computing Science, Huazhong Agricultural UniversityWuhan, China
Advisor: Prof. Feng Shi.
Selected Research Projects
2025CellHermes: Language-based multimodal omics understandingAI for Science
Propose CellHermes, a biological large language model that integrates multimodal forms of omics data,
such as transcriptomic profile and PPI network, through natural language for better omics understanding.
2025ProactiveVA: Proactive visual analytics with LLM-based UI agentsHuman-AI Interaction
Designed a proactive GUI-agent framework that perceives user difficulties, reasons about assistance strategies, and acts within visual analytics interfaces to support data analysis.
2024LightVA: LLM-agent-based task planning and visual analytics generationVisual Analytics
Built an LLM-agent workflow for decomposing analysis goals, generating visual analytics systems, and optimizing multiple linked views, reducing development from weeks to hours.
Proposed an early LLM-enhanced visual analytics framework that supports onboarding, exploration, recommendation, and report generation. The paper is an ESI Highly Cited Paper (top 1%).
2023ContextWing: Visual comparison for evolving social media contextsSocial Computing
Developed a text comparison and visual analytics method that combines dynamic topic modeling and sequential pattern mining to reveal semantic evolution in large-scale social media streams.
Jielin Feng,Xinwu Ye,Qianhui Li,Verena Prantl,Jun-Hsiang Yao,Yuheng Zhao,Yun Wang,Siming Chen.
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026.
Yuheng Zhao,Xinyu Wang,Chen Guo,Min Lu,Siming Chen.
Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2023.
Lei Peng,Yuheng Zhao,Yijie Hou,Qinghong Wang,Siqi Shen,Xingui Lai,Junting Gao,Jiaqi Dong,Ziyue Lin,Siming Chen.
Proceedings of IEEE VIS (VAST Challenge), 2021.
Award for Strong Human-in-the-Loop Analysis Methodology
Yu Zhang,Yuheng Zhao,Yuhan Guo,Guozheng Li,Siming Chen,Xiaoru Yuan.
Proceedings of the IEEE VIS Workshop on GenAI, Agents, and the Future of VIS, 2025.