Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

This talk will be held in a hybrid format, both in person at Tokyo Meeting Room 1 at Nihonbashi and online by Zoom. Tokyo Meeting Room 1: *only available to AIP researchers.

DATE & TIME
January 9, 2026: 14:00 pm – 15:00 pm (JST)

TITLE
Personalized Models of Affect and Cognition

SPEAKER
Larry Zhang (Indiana University Bloomington)

ABSTRACT
In my talk, I will present a case for leveraging novel computational approaches to accelerate fundamental understanding of affective and cognitive processes, with emphasis on personalization and individual differences. I will demonstrate how advanced computational models can aid us in producing a higher resolution understanding of affective and cognitive processes, through three distinct areas (stress sensing, semantic memory search, and human-AI co-design) I performed research on during my PhD. Through these works, I argue that building fundamental understanding of individual variability—rather than methodology alone—is essential groundwork for developing truly personalized models of affect and cognition.

PROFILE
Larry Zhang is a final-year dual PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington in Informatics and Intelligent Systems Engineering. His research spans affective computing, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction, with a focus on using these methodologies to better describe affective and cognitive processes. Larry’s research background spans both academia (NII, Central European University, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, IU) and industry (Samsung Research America, Toyota Research Institute, Sony R&D, Dolby Laboratories), enabling him to provide rich insight into how affective and cognitive modeling is studied across different research communities.