Rong-Ching Chang

rocchang@ucdavis.edu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, advised by Prof. Hao-Chuan Wang. My research interests lie in Human-AI agent interaction, multi-agent systems, and applied agent systems, spanning fine-tuning, RAG, synthetic data, RL, harness design, automated research, and prompt optimization. I have 15+ publications at top venues including CHI, AAAI, ICWSM, CogSci, KDD, and ICLR.

Education

University of California, Davis

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Advisor: Prof. Hao-Chuan Wang
Noyce Fellow · GPA: 3.6/4.0

Sep 2021 – Sep 2026 (expected)

Tunghai University, Taiwan

M.Sc. in Computer Science

Advisor: Prof. Chu-Hsing Lin
Honorary Member of Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society · GPA: 4.0/4.0

Sep 2019 – June 2021

Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan

B.A. in Finance

Advisor: Prof. Yi-Pei Chen
Academic Excellence Award · GPA: 3.9/4.0

June 2014 – June 2017

Experience

Scale AI

Human Frontier Collective Specialist – GenAI

Contributing to the next generation of frontier models.

Jun 2025 – Aug 2026

Industrial Technology Research Institute

Sponsored Research Collaborator

Built emotional intelligent conversation agent.

Jan 2025 – Sep 2025

Experian

Data Scientist

Spearheaded end-to-end design, development, and deployment of product prototypes using advanced multimodal models. Presented to company CEO as foundation for production release.

Jun 2024 – Sep 2024

CreatorDB

Data Scientist

Built recommendation systems using LLMs. Developed sponsored content detection for YouTube. Streamlined ML pipeline, consolidating 16 model executions into a single operation.

Jun 2023 – Sep 2023

University of Southern California

Research Intern

Built multilingual misogyny and sexism classifier (22,000+ downloads on Hugging Face). Invented a novel causal inference method for online forum comments.

Jun 2022 – Sep 2022

Industrial Technology Research Institute

AI Research Intern, Computational Intelligence Technology

Researched and tested papers focused on AutoML frameworks.

Jan 2020 – Aug 2020

Publications

Conference Papers

From Unilateral Behavioral Tuning to Human-AI Co-Configuration

Rong-Ching Chang, Hao-Chuan Wang
Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment Workshop at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026
Paper

Convergence, Reciprocity, and Asymmetry: Communication Accommodation Between Large Language Models and Users Across Cultures

Rong-Ching Chang, Hao-Chuan Wang
The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Student Abstract, 2025
47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2025
Paper

Polarized Online Discourse on Abortion: Frames and Hostile Expressions among Liberals and Conservatives

Ashwin Rao, Rong-Ching Chang, Qiankun Zhong, Kristina Lerman, Magdalena Wojcieszak
The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2025
Paper

Feedback Loops and the Chilling Effects in Online Discussions: The Complex Dynamics of Harmful Speech and Negative Emotions

Rong-Ching Chang, Jonathan May, Kristina Lerman
16th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS), 2023
Paper

Anger Breeds Controversy: Analyzing Controversy and Emotions on Reddit

Kai Chen, Zihao He, Rong-Ching Chang, Jonathan May, Kristina Lerman
16th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS), 2023
Paper

#RoeOverturned: Twitter Dataset on the Abortion Rights Controversy

Rong-Ching Chang, Ashwin Rao, Qiankun Zhong, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Kristina Lerman
The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2023
Paper

Dataset of Propaganda Techniques of the State-Sponsored Information Operation of the People's Republic of China

Rong-Ching Chang, Chun-Ming Lai, Kai-Lai Chang, Chu-Hsing Lin
Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web with International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD), 2021
Paper

Online Sentiment And Post Reactions On Facebook: Leading Indicator For State-Level Covid-19 Confirmed Cases

Rong-Ching Chang, Chun-Ming Lai, Chu-Hsing Lin, Kai-Chih Pai
AI for Public Health Workshop at ICLR, 2021
Paper

Online Sentiment on Facebook: a Leading Indicator for State-Level Covid-19 Confirm Cases

Rong-Ching Chang, Chu-Hsing Lin, Chun-Ming Lai, Kai-Chih Pai
International Conference on Information Technologies and Practices, 2021

Detecting Propaganda on the Sentence Level during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Rong-Ching Chang, Chu-Hsing Lin
Cryptology and Information Security Conference (CISC), 2020
Paper

Pandemic Response and Crisis Informatics: An Imperative for Public Health Messaging

Chun-Ming Lai, Yi-Chen Liu, Rong-Ching Chang, Jon W. Chapman, Chu-Hsing Lin
International Computer Symposium (ICS), 2020
Paper

Leveraging Top Participants Networks Topology to Identify Suspiciously Manipulated Posts

Chun-Ming Lai, Huan-Chieh Tseng, Rong-Ching Chang, Tzer-Shyong Chen, Kai-Chih Pai
National Conference on Science and Technology of National Defense, 2020

An Attribute-based Encryption for Cloud Medical Data Sharing and Its Implementation

Chu-Hsing Lin, Chu-I Wu, Chia-Yuan Cheng, Rong-Ching Chang
The Symposium on Digital Life Technologies (DLT), 2020

Unconnected searchable encryption and implementation for cloud medical record services

Chu-Hsing Lin, Yuan-Xiang Chi, Xuan-Jie Wang, Rong-Ching Chang
The Symposium on Digital Life Technologies (DLT), 2020
Journal Papers

Political content and news are polarized but other content is not in YouTube watch histories

Magdalena Wojcieszak, Rong-Ching Chang, Ericka Menchen-Trevino
Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2023
Paper

Entropy-Based Time Window Features Extraction for Machine Learning to Predict Acute Kidney Injury in ICU

Chun-Te Huang, Rong-Ching Chang, Yi-Lu Tsai, Kai-Chih Pai, Tsai-Jung Wang, Chia-Tien Hsu, Cheng-Hsu Chen, Chien-Chung Huang, Min-Shian Wang, Lun-Chi Chen, Ruey-Kai Sheu, Chieh-Liang Wu, Chun-Ming Lai
Applied Sciences, 2021
Paper
Non-Archival Papers

CommunityKG-RAG: Leveraging Community Structures in Knowledge Graphs for Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Fact-Checking

Rong-Ching Chang, Jiawei Zhang
Paper

Exposure to Congenial and Problematic Videos on YouTube: Algorithmic Recommendations or Off-Platform Factors?

Rong-Ching Chang, Magdalena Wojcieszak

Service

Reviewer for Journals & Conferences
  • ACM CHI, 2025 & 2026
  • ACM CSCW, 2024 & 2025
  • ICWSM, 2025
  • ACL Rolling Review, 2024
  • IEEE/ACM ASONAM, 2023 & 2024
  • Scientific Report (Nature), 2021
Media Mentions
Certificates
  • Certificate of Appreciation for Exceptional Mentorship, Project Tyra, Fulbright Taiwan (2023, 2025)
  • ACM-W Chapter Winter School on Fairness in AI
  • Nvidia: Combining Data Types through an Image Captioning Project
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals