Shengchen Zhang

Experience

Work

Mar, 2016 -- Now

Research intern at Center for Digital Innovation, Tongji University. Work includes:

• Interaction design and development.
• Organizing and leading HRI@CDI, a student research team on human-robot interaction.
• Building and managing the lab's Collaborative Mixed Reality Platform.
• Developing course materials for undergraduate and graduate courses, namely Interaction Design and Open Source Hardware and Programming.

Sep, 2018 -- Now

Research intern at City Science Lab@Shanghai, a collaborative lab between Tongji University and MIT Media Lab. Work includes:

• Using machine learning methods to analyze video footage of pedestrian activity in NICE 2035, to understand the effect of urban interventions on neighborhood vibrancy.
• Front-end development for the lab's workshop Equity WITHOUT Zoning on City Science Summit 2020.

Projects

Knowledge exchange HRI stack (Ongoing. Link)

A design and software stack for designing and implementing knowledge exchange human-robot interactions.This project is a collaborative effort by the HRI@CDI team. It features the following:

• An interface design pattern library suitable for presenting knowledge graphs to end users.
• A software library for extracting knowledge snippets from human-robot dialogues. (WIP)
• Virtual and Wizard-of-Oz testing tools for the Temi robot.

Personal contributions include:

• Proposing research questions and organizing research work.
• Designing the pattern library (in collaboration with Zixuan Wang).
• Software development for the Wizard-of-Oz testing tool and knowledge dialogue library.

Equity WITHOUT Zoning simulation (Link)

A web-based simulation for the Equity WITHOUT Zoning workshop, presented at City Science Summit 2020. The workshop discussed the possibility of applying algorithmic zoning and dynamic incentive policies to our neighborhoods, centered around this simulation tool.

Personal contributions include:

• Interface design (in collaboration with Hexin Zhang).
• Front-end development.

Collaborative Mixed Reality Platform (Link)

The Collaborative Mixed Reality Platform at CDI combines rigid body motion capture and virtual reality technologies to enable up to 10 users to enter the same touch-able virtual environment.

Personal contributions include:

• Participating in interviews of lab members and drafting specifications based on their needs.
• Development and maintenance of the platform, using Optitrack and Unity.
• Managing the platform, and providing technical support for faculty and students.
• Developed a prototypical autonomous car testing platform.

Candle.js (Link)

A personal project. Candle.js is a GPU-accelerated library to make running PyTorch deep learning models in the browser a bit easier. It also serves as a tensor computation library.

Publications

HCII'22: Designing Social Interactions for Learning Personalized Knowledge in Service Robots

CHI'21: Patterns for Representing Knowledge Graphs to Communicate Situational Knowledge of Service Robots

Packaging Engineering: Data Presentation and Interaction of the Internet of Things Based on Augmented Reality

Education

Starting Sep. 2021

Ph.D. Design (Advanced Technology & Creativity Design), Tongji University.

Sep. 2019 -- Jun. 2021

ME Interaction design, Tongji University.

Sep. 2015 -- Jun. 2019

BA Media and communication design, Tongji University.

Skills

• Interaction design
• Software development using JavaScript, Python, and Unity
• Hardware prototyping using Arduino & Raspberry Pi
• Data science and machine learning
• 3D modeling, animation, and special effects
• Communication design and illustration