Charlotte Zhu
Building human-centered AI products, systems, and research.
MS Computer Science (HCI) at Stanford ยท Stanford HCI Group
About
I'm Charlotte, a master's student in Computer Science (HCI) at Stanford, where I also earned my BS in Symbolic Systems with Honors ('25). I work in the Stanford HCI Group with Prof. Michael Bernstein and in the Culture and Emotion Lab with Prof. Jeanne Tsai.
I build and study human-centered AI that cares about how people feel, across product, full-stack engineering, and research.
Research interests: human-centered AI, digital wellbeing, social computing, social media, affective computing, and cultures & affects.
Projects
Showing 8 projects.
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Modeling Experienced Emotions on Social Media
Predicting the emotional impact of social media posts on the people who read them.
Under review, CSCW '27
- Research
- AI
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Correcting Cross-Cultural Bias in VLM Facial Emotion Recognition
LoRA fine-tuning of LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen2.5-VL to correct cross-cultural failures in facial emotion recognition; data balance mattered most.
Stanford CS231N final project
- Research
- AI
- LoRA
- LLaVA-1.5
- Qwen2.5-VL
- Grad-CAM
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Voyage
A mobile app that helps Stanford study-abroad students find local activities and build community, with an AI itinerary generator.
Interviews, RITE testing, and an A/B-tested posting flow
- Product
- Design
- Figma
- User interviews
- RITE testing
- A/B testing
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Sabotage & Spice
A fast-paced cooking-competition card game of secret missions, bluffing, and trading, balanced through three rounds of playtesting.
Balanced over 3 playtests
- Design
- Product
- Creative
- Paper prototyping
- Playtesting
Publications
* denotes equal contribution.
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Modeling Experienced Emotions on Social Media via Emotional Impact Prediction
CSCW '27 (Under review), 2026 -
Investigating the impact of literacy on young people's attitudes and behaviors in human-LLM interactions
CHI '27 (Under review), 2026 -
Social Media Feed Elicitation
CHI '26, Honorable Mention Award, 2026 -
LoveSims: Exploring "what-if" scenarios for relationship insights and compatibility
Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '25), 2025 -
Enhancing critical thinking with AI: A tailored warning system for RAG models
Human-AI Interaction for Augmented Reasoning Workshop, CHI '25, 2025 -
Implied vs. expressed: Understanding the impact of social media posts on users' emotional experience with LLM predictions
Affective Computing Workshop, CHI '25, 2025
Fun Facts
- I worked as course assistant for CS147: Intro to HCI and CS278: Social Computing. ALL of my mentee teams won course awards for 147.
- I'm a fanfiction writer, zine editor, and cosplayer. I have written 250k+ words, self-published fanfiction zines, worked with 15+ artists and sold a total of 200+ copies at Cons.
- Born and raised in China, I have spent my educational trajectory in Canada, the Netherlands, the US, Japan, and the UK.