Hi, I'm Silang

My journey in HCI started with the reading of "The Singularity is Near" in the last year of my primary school in China, after which I asked my parents to send me abroad for a less conservative, English-based education. After a few days of hunger strike, followed by memorizing all the English vocabulary in 6 American primary school textbooks in one month, I left for Singapore alone to stay with my aunt. In my first year living abroad, technologies like search engine and electronic dictionary helped me make sense of the new English environment. They became my best assistants, nurtured my interests in STEM and arts, and helped me find a home away from home.

Nowadays, when I look back at that period of teenage rebellion, I couldn’t help but wonder: what would have happened had my journey taken place 100 years earlier, without modern technologies? And how would another child’s act of defiance unfold 100 years later? Will they reflect on their thoughts and habits captured by their wearable AI companion and plan their future with it, or will they simply rely on AI to tell them what to do based on their past behaviours? How will future multimodal AI systems empower them to better achieve their goals, and what are the unseen risks in such systems which can generate different sensory stimulation anytime, anywhere? How will the interaction with such multimodal AI systems look like in the future?

With these questions in mind, I am now pursuing my master degree in the Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) program at University of Washington (UW). Before UW, I completed my bachelor's degree in computer engineering with first class honours at National University of Singapore (NUS), where I conducted HCI research on wearables, heads-up computing and applied AI/ML in Professor Li-Shiuan Peh's group and Professor Zhao Shengdong's group. I also served as the assistant to CEO at a Singaporean start-up building a Singaporean sign language LLM for a smartphone-based two-way sign language translation application, and co-founded another start-up for mixed-reality based physical education for local secondary school and junior college students in Singapore.

Outside the lab, I play survival horror games like the Resident Evil series, tour distinct architecture in the US like the Seattle Public Library, and think a lot about how long will it take for GUI to become the next CLI.