About Me

Hi 👋👋 I am a third year Ph.D student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Notre Dame. My advisor is Prof. Toby Jia-Jun Li. Before joining Notre Dame, I received dual Bachelor degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and University of Glasgow (Graduated with First-class honor degree). I also spent a wonderful year as research assistant at Center for Future Media, UESTC working with Prof. Jingkuan Song and Prof. Lianli Gao.

My research falls in the intersection of Human-AI collaboration, Computer vision, Computer audio and accessibility, where I leverage human-centered method to build human-AI collaborative systems to strengthen the AI power and to satisfy the practical needs of a variety of popluations.

News
  • 02/2024

    📣 Excited to share that I will be working at Microsoft Research as a research intern this summer! I am collaborating with the amazing EPIC group!

  • 01/2024

    📄 Our paper got accepted by CHI 2024! We presented SPICA, a system to facilitate interactive video consumption experience for blind or low-vision viewers. See you in Hawaii 🏝️

  • 01/2024

    📄 Our paper got accepted by TiiS. We extended our previous research at IUI'23 with new experiments on large language models (GPT-4) and a root cause analysis of the model attention and human attention. Check the preprint here.

  • 12/2023

    ☘️ The official website of ND HCI is out! Come and meet the brilliant minds at Notre Dame! Go Irish!

  • 10/2023

    📄 Our paper on Interactive Text-to-SQL Generation got accepted to EMNLP 2023!

  • 06/2023

    📄 PEANUT got accepted by UIST 2023! We presented a human-AI collaboration tool for annotating sounding objects in videos. See you in San Francisco 🌁！

  • 01/2023

    📄 One paper accepted by PLATEAU Workshop. We did an empirical study on developer behaviors for validating and repairing AI-generated code. Check our paper here.

  • 12/2022

    📣 I will be working at Adobe Research as a research scientist intern in 2023 Summer 🏔️. Super excited to work with Dingzeyu Li.

  • 01/2023

    📄 Our paper on error taxonomy and error-handling mechanisms in Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) got accepted by ACM IUI 2023. See you in Sydney 🇦🇺!

  • 10/2022

    💬 Oral presentation (virtual) at AV4D Workshop @ ECCV 2022.

  • 10/2022

    💬 Presenting a poster titled Towards Effective Multi-Modal Human-AI Collaboration on Audiovisual Data @ Lucy Institute for Data & Society 2022 Fall Symposium.

  • 03/2022

    🏆 I'm honored to receive the gift from NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grant Program (1 RTX A6000 48GB) to support my research in creative tools and VR/AR.

  • 09/2021

    🥪 Our lab has an official name! SaNDwich: Science of AI at Notre Dame With Interaction between Computer and Human.

  • 09/2021

    ☘️ Started my Ph.D. journey at University of Notre Dame

Selected Publications
SPICA: Interactive Video Content Exploration through Augmented Audio Descriptions for Blind or Low-Vision Viewers [Paper]

Zheng Ning, Brianna Wimer, Kaiwen Jiang, Keyi Chen, Jerrick Ban, Yapeng Tian, Yuhang Zhao, and Toby Li
In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'24)

Insights into Natural Language Database Query Errors: From Attention Misalignment to User Handling Strategies [Paper]

Zheng Ning*, Yuan Tian*, Zheng Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Toby Li
ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) IUI-2023 special issue

PEANUT: A Human-AI Collaborative Tool for Annotating Audio-Visual Data [Paper] [Demo]

Zheng Zhang*, Zheng Ning*, Chenliang Xu, Yapeng Tian, and Toby Li
In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'23)

Interactive Text-to-SQL Generation via Editable Step-by-Step Explanations [Paper]

Yuan Tian, Zheng Zhang, Zheng Ning, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Tianyi Zhang
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'23)

An Empirical Study of Model Errors & User Error Discovery and Repair Strategies in Natural Language Database Queries [Paper]

Zheng Ning*, Zheng Zhang*, Tianyi Sun, Tian Yuan, Tianyi Zhang, and Toby Li
The 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'23)

Human-in-the-Loop Generation of Spatial Audio from Videos with Monaural Audio [Paper] [Demo]

Zheng Ning*, Zheng Zhang*, Jerrick Ban, Kaiwen Jiang, Ruohong Gan, Yapeng Tian, and Toby Li
ECCV 2022 Workshop on Visual Learning of Sounds in Spaces (ECCV-AV4D)

My Experience
  • 05/2023 - 10/2023
    Research Scientist/Engineer Intern

    Adobe Research, Seattle, WA

  • 09/2021 - Present
    Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering

    University of Notre Dame, USA

  • 09/2020 - 05/2021
    Research Assistant

    University of Eletronic Science and Technology of China, China

    I was doing research on audio-visual learning

  • 09/2016 - 06/2020
    B.Eng. in Electric and Electronic Engineering

    University of Eletronic Science and Technology of China, China

    Joint education program with University of Glasgow

  • 09/2016 - 06/2020
    B.Eng. in Electronic Information Engineerin

    University of Glasgow, UK

    I graduated with First-class hornor degree

  • 07/2018 - 08/2018
    Summer research program

    University of Glasgow, UK

    I was doing research on "Environmental sound source recognition"

  • 07/2017 - 08/2017
    Summer exchange program

    University of British Columbia, Canada

    I was taking courses on "Strategic Thinking and Design"