
Hi, I'm Zhonghao Shi
I'm an Incoming Postdoc Fellow at
Harvard University
Harvard University
My research focuses on developing personalized, human-centered AI and robots. More specifically, I build and evaluate machine learning models, AI agents, and socially assistive robots that adapt to users’ individual needs to support better learning, health, and overall quality of life.
I am fortunate to be joining Prof. Ying Xu's lab at Harvard University as an incoming postdoc fellow to work on AI for education this December. I 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