
Junhan "Judy" Kong is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Information School at the University of Washington, advised by Prof. Jacob O. Wobbrock in the ACE Lab, the DUB Group, and the CREATE Center. Prior to that, she received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science with an additional major in Human-Computer Interaction and minors in Statistics and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked with Prof. Jeffrey P. Bigham and Prof. Anhong Guo. She has also worked at Adobe Research and Meta Reality Labs as a research scientist intern.
Her research is in human-computer interaction (HCI), accessibility, interaction techniques, and human-centered AI. Her work has been published at top-tier conferences including CHI, UIST, ASSETS, MobileHCI, and SUI, and has received the Best Paper Award from MobileHCI and a Best Paper Nomination from ASSETS.
My research is guided by a vision of computing systems that recognize and serve human diversity: user needs vary across abilities, contexts, and situations, and even at different times of day for the same person—there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution that simply works for everyone. My research addresses the heterogeneity of human abilities and needs, and aims to answer the key questions of how technologies can recognize and respect human ability differences and enhance human agency and autonomy.
My research approaches these questions through three pillars of work: (1) Modeling Abilities: establishing quantitative understanding of varying human abilities by modeling multimodal interaction behavior, (2) Enabling Personalization: advancing human-AI systems that enable personalized interactions based on user abilities, leveraging machine intelligence while enhancing human agency and autonomy, and (3) Empowering Creation: lowering barriers to creating personalized, accessible interfaces through infrastructural support for design and development.
“How can we turn interaction behavior into measurable, actionable representations of users' abilities?”
Quantitative characterization of human abilities through input behavior and sensor data
“How should personalized interfaces leverage intelligent capabilities while retaining human agency?”
Human-AI collaboration on personalized interactions based on users' abilities
“How can we systematically lower barriers to creating personalized, accessible interfaces?”
Design and development support for ability-based interface creation
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Xiyuan Shen*, Seokhyun Hwang*, Junhan Kong, Alexandre L. S. Filipowicz, Andrew Best, Jean M. Costa, Scott Carter, James Fogarty, Jacob O. Wobbrock
UIST 2025
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