Hi, I'm Zhonghao Shi

I'm a PhD Candiate at
University of Southern California (USC)
My research interest lies in human-centered AI and machine learning. My research focuses on developing and evaluating socially assistive robots and AI agents for applications such as education, ensuring that these systems are not only personalized to each user's unique preferences and needs but also aligned with domain values and expectations of the broader communities in which they are deployed.
I recently defended my PhD at the University of Southern California (USC) where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Maja Matarić. Previously I worked on trustworthy machine learning at JPMorganChase and studied at University College London (UCL).

Featured Publications

My latest research on human-centered AI and machine learning.

We investigated the effectiveness of test-time adaptation for child speech recognition, with the goal of enabling continuous, unsupervised adaptation at test time.
Interpseech 2025
We conducted a systematic review of AI-enabled mobile apps for pediatric speech therapy
IDC 2025
We developed an open-source learning module for more accessible and engaging AI education
EAAI-AAAI 2024
We introduced HRIBench, a visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across a diverse set of human perceptual tasks critical for HRI.
ISER 2025
We evaluated and personalized user-perceived quality of text-to-speech voices for delivering mindfulness meditation with different physical embodiments.
HRI 2023
We applied supervised machine-learning algorithms to model user engagement in the context of long-term, in-home SAR interventions for children on the autism spectrum.
Science Robotics 2020