Aysa X. Fan

PhD Candidate · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

My research sits at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP), educational data mining, and computer science education. I'm broadly interested in how people learn, and how NLP and large language models can support that — from improving how novice programmers develop skills, to enabling more efficient classification with limited labeled data. My work has been published at venues including EMNLP, EACL, EDM, SIGCSE, and ICQE, with two best paper nominations. Before my PhD, I spent five years in industry working in NLP, data quality, and QA. Outside of research, I co-founded a learning center where I taught children's art — never touching a student's work, instead guiding observation and self-expression through language and demonstration.