Aysa X. Fan

PhD Candidate · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

My research examines how AI systems affect human learning, cognition, and behavior in educational settings. I build evaluation frameworks, including LLM benchmarking, human evaluation protocols, and behavioral annotation pipelines, that measure whether AI produces good outcomes for the people who use it, not just correct outputs. I'm particularly interested in the gap between what AI systems optimize for and what learners actually need, and in translating empirical observations into improvements to AI systems and policy. My work has been published at venues including EMNLP, EACL, SIGCSE, AIED, and ICQE, with two best paper nominations. Before my PhD, I spent five years in industry working in NLP data annotation and product analytics. 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.