Hao Yan

About Me

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and GMU NLP Group at George Mason University, advised by Prof. Ziyu Yao.

My research interest is in Natural Language Processing, with a focus on human-AI interaction via natural language. The goal of my research is to facilitate effective and seamless collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence systems including developing interfaces and interaction methods that allow humans to communicate their goals and intentions to AI systems, and receive understandable and desirable responses in return. This also includes studying arising research questions such as ethical issues in machine generations.

Recently, I conducted research on interactive (conversational) code generation. The primary goal is to develop methods that allow humans to effectively communicate their coding intentions to Large Language Models (LLMs) via natural language, ensuring that the generated code is accurate, efficient, and aligned with user expectations. In addition to improving usability, my research also identifies critical AI safety concerns, particularly in preventing the generation of vulnerable or insecure code. Currently, I aim to ensure that AI-generated code not only functions as expected but also adheres to safety standards, reducing the risks of errors and unintended security vulnerabilities.

Before my Ph.D. study, I obtained my master’s degree in Computer Science from George Mason University in 2020 and my bachelor’s degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from Fujian Normal University in 2017.

In my spare time. I enjoy engaging in various indoor/outdoor activities such as basketball, badminton, swimming, visiting the gym, and hiking. In addition, I really enjoy tasting delicious foods and cooking by myself.

Research Interests

• Human-AI Interaction
• Semantic Parsing
• Question Answering
• Text Generation
• AI Safety

News

• [June. 2023] I will serve as a student volunteer at ACL 2023.
• [May. 2023] I was granted the “Graduate Student Travel Fund (GSTF)” from GMU.
• [May. 2023] Our paper “Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing” is accepted to ACL 2023.

Publications

Experiences

• May. 2021 - current: Graduate Research Assistant, George Mason University
• Aug. 2020 - May. 2021: Graduate Teaching Assistant, George Mason University
• Feb. 2020 - Aug. 2021: Front-end Developer, Bright Sky Tech Inc
• Jan. 2020 - Dec. 2020: Graduate Teaching Assistant, George Mason University

Services

Studnet Volunteer

• The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023

Awards

• Graduate Student Travel Fund, GMU, 2023
• Distinguished GTA Award, Department of CS, GMU, 2022
• Graduate Students Poster Award (Honorable Mention), GMU, 2022
• Outstanding GTA Award, Department of CS, GMU, 2020, 2021

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