Zhixin (phonetically: Tz-ih Shin) is a Ph.D. student at the iSchool. Her research lies at the intersection of social cognition, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. Specifically, she explores the artificiality of emerging social technologies such as voice assistants, chatbots, and social robots, examining how people—particularly children—perceive these AI entities as possessing mind or mental capacities, such as the ability to feel emotions and engage in purposeful actions. Her work focuses on understanding how these perceptions develop and change through interactions with AI, including the relational, moral, and cognitive factors that shape human-AI relationships.
She is utilizing LinkedIn, Twitter (@zhixinli26), and her personal website as hubs for meaningful social interaction. Outside her research, she collects dog plushies, listens to City Pop, and plays cyberpunk visual novel games.