Alice Gao

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I am a CSE Ph.D. student at the University of Washington advised by R. Benjamin Shapiro. I am also very fortunate to have an on-going collaboration with Jason Wu. Broadly, my research focuses on developing new methods and tools to support user interface (UI) design and evaluation. These methods can be integrated in both semi-automated and fully automated approaches. I draw upon human computer interaction (HCI) research and computational modeling to evaluate UI design and usability.


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Selected Publications

Alice Gao, Weixi Tong, Rishab Vempati, Katharina Reinecke, R. Benjamin Shapiro, Tianyi Zhang, Jason Wu. Training Computer Use Agents to Assess the Usability of Graphical User Interfaces. April 2026. arXiv preprint.

Alice Gao, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Maarten Sap, Katharina Reinecke. Framing an AI with Values Reduces AI Reliance in AI-supported Writing Tasks. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26). Montreal, QC, Canada. June 2026. https://doi.org/10.1145/3805689.3812369.

Nino Migineishvili, Alice Gao, Adinawa Adjabodjou, Dhanaraj Thaku, René Just, Katharina Reinecke. Regulating AI: Where U.S. State Policy and HCI (Mis)align. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26). Barcelona, Spain. April 2026. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791424.

Donghoon Shin, Alice Gao, Rock Pang, Katharina Reinecke, Emily Tseng. Interrogating Design Homogenization in Web Vibe Coding. March 2026. arXiv preprint.