About Me
human-machine cognition | multimodal communication
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive and Computational Communication and an M.S. student in Statistics at UCLA, supervised by Prof. Jungseock Joo, Prof. Rick Dale, Prof. Hongjing Lu and Prof. Elisa Kreiss.
ABOUT MY RESEARCH
My dissertation, titled “From Language Models to Multimodal Intelligence,” aims to map human and computational models into the framework of symbolic vs. embodied cognition, leveraging deep learning simulations and human-AI interaction studies. As a highly interdisciplinary researcher, I’m passionate about answering the fundamental question: How can multimodal AI (such as LLMs and language-vision models) enhance communication, problem-solving, and collaboration with human users?
My research lies in the intersection of deep learning, cognitive science, and multimodal communication. I am proficient in developing deep neural networks that process and integrate various forms of data, such as language (BERT, GPT) and image-text (CLIP) embeddings, behavioral (OpenFace, OpenPose), auditory (mel spectrogram or MFCC), and neuroimaging signals (fNIRS, fMRI).
I currently work as a PhD student researcher at the Communicative Mind (Co-Mind) Lab and the Computation and Language for Society (Coalas) Lab. At Co-Mind, I develop end-to-end pipelines for processing multimodal conversational data. At Coalas, I collaborate on multi-agent LLM simulation and analyze neural and multimodal responses from human-AI vs. human-human interactions.
Several of my papers are published in Cognitive Systems Research, Computational Communication Research, Culture and Computing, CogSci, CHI, ICWSM and LREC conference and workshop proceedings. I am also a finalist for the 2023-2024 Meta PhD Fellowship and the recipient of the UCLA Graduate Council Diversity Fellowship, which includes full tuition and stipend coverage.
ABOUT MY WORK EXPERIENCES
I am currently working as a part-time AI Engineer/Data Scientist at Sony Pictures Entertainment, where I build GenAI pipelines for internal BI and data science tools, establishing best practices for LLM pipelines within the company.
I previously worked as an LLM Engineer/Data Science Intern at Beyond Limits AI, where I automated knowledge graph creation using LLMs, and as an NLP Research Engineer Intern at Testin, where I implemented a Seq2Seq model for OCR misspelling correction.
In my free time, you’ll find me bouldering (I just hit V5!), hiking, playing golf, tackling half marathons (I've completed five in the greater LA area), oil painting in classic style, and diving into all things true crime!
Access my Curriculum Vitae and resume.
Research Areas
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Multimodal Communication
Human-AI Intelligence
Explainable AI (XAI)
Computational Cognitive Science & Neuroscience
Computational Social Science
Education
Ph.D. Communication, 2026, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
M.S. Statistics, 2025, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
M.A. Communication Management, 2019, University of Southern California
B.S. Business Administration & Cinematic Arts, 2018, University of Southern California
Contact Me
University of California Los Angeles
Department of Communication
Department of Statistics
yanrujiang AT g.ucla.edu