Ruijia Cheng, Ph.D.
"Regina" 程瑞加
Human-computer Interaction Researcher
Hi, I'm Regina! I'm a researcher in Human-computer Interaction.
Currently I'm a research scientist in the Human Centered Machine Intelligence group at Apple, where I do research and development on UI intelligence and responsible AI.
I received my PhD from the Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) department at University of Washington, where I was part of the Community Data Science Collective research group and mentored by Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill and Dr. Sayamindu Dasgupta.
I received my Bachelor of Science degrees in Cognitive Science and Mathematics from University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where I did research in the Design Lab.
SELECTED PROJECTS
Designing for Programming and Creativity
Scaffolding Code Generation with
Ephemeral UIs in Computational Notebooks.
Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models.
Replaying Accessibility Tests from
Natural Language.
A visual block based programming system for computational data literacy.
How Online Communities
Shape Software Developers' Trust in Code Generation Tools.
Investigating and Designing for Trust in Code Generation Tools.
Mapping the Design Space of Text Summarization.
Empirical Studies about Informal Learning in Online Communities
PUBLICATIONS
Peer Reviewed Publications
Ruijia Cheng, Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill. Conspiracist Attributes Differentiate Pro- and Anti-vaccine Online Discourses about Data. 2026. Accepted to Scientific Reports.
Jon-Tait Beason, Ruijia Cheng, Eldon Schoop, Jeffrey Nichols. Athena: Intermediate Representations for Iterative Scaffolded App Generation with an LLM. 2026. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2026).
Ruijia Cheng, Jenny T. Liang, Eldon Schoop, Jeffrey Nichols. Mapping the Design Space of User Experience for Computer Use Agents. 2026. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2026).
Harsh Agrawal, Eldon Schoop, Xinlei Pan, Anuj Mahajan, Ari Seff, Di Feng, Ruijia Cheng, et al. UINavBench: A Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Interactive Digital Agents. 2025. IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025).
Alan Leung, Ruijia Cheng, Jason Wu, Jeffrey Nichols, Titus Barik. SQUIRE: Interactive UI Authoring via Slot Query Intermediate Representations. 2025. Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2025).
Tiffany Tseng, Ruijia Cheng, Andrew M. McNutt, Jeffrey Nichols. Keyframer: A Design Probe for Exploring LLM Assistance in 2D Animation Design. 2025. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2025).
Ruijia Cheng, Titus Barik, Alan Leung, Fred Hohman, Jeffrey Nichols. BISCUIT: Scaffolding LLM-generated Code with Ephemeral UIs in Computational Notebooks. 2024. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2024).
Ruotong Wang, Ruijia Cheng, Denae Ford, Thomas Zimmermann. Investigating and Designing for Trust in Code Generation Tools.
Maryam Taeb, Amanda Swearngin, Eldon Schoop, Ruijia Cheng, Yue Jiang, Jeffrey Nichols. AXNav: Replaying Accessibility Tests from Natural Language. 2023. Accepted to the
the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024)
Ruijia Cheng, Ruotong Wang, Thomas Zimmermann, Denae Ford. " It would work for me too": How Online Communities
Shape Software Developers' Trust in Code Generation Tools. 2024. Accepted to the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.
Ruijia Cheng, Aayushi Dangol, Frances Ello, Lingyu Wang, Sayamindu Dasgupta. Concepts, practices, and perspectives for developing
computational data literacy: Insights from workshops with a new data programming system. 2023. Accepted to the
ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC 2023)
Ruijia Cheng, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Benjamin Mako Hill. How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices' Use of Data Structures. 2022. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022).
Ruijia Cheng, Benjamin Mako Hill. Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch. 2022. Accepted to the ACM Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference (CSCW 2022).
Ruijia Cheng*, Jenna Frens.* Feedback Exchange and Online Affinity: A Case Study of Online Fanfiction Writers. 2022. Accepted to the ACM Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference (CSCW 2022).
Ruijia Cheng, Alison Smith-Renner, Ke Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes. Mapping the Design Space of Human-AI Interaction in Text Summarization. 2022. Accepted to the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Theme: Human-Centered Natural Language Processing (NAACL 2022).
Vivian Lai, Alison Smith-Renner, Ke Zhang, Ruijia Cheng, Wenjuan Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes. An Exploration of Post-Editing Effectiveness in Text Summarization. 2022. Accepted to the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Theme: Human-Centered Natural Language Processing (NAACL 2022).
Ruijia Cheng, Mark Zachry. Building Community Knowledge in Online Data Science Competitions: Motivation, Practices and Challenges. 2020. Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative
Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020).
Ruijia Cheng, Ziwen Zeng, Maysnow Liu, Steven Dow. Critique Me: Exploring How Creators Publicly Request Feedback in an Open Online Community. 2020. Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020).
Preprints
Yuting Ning, Ruijia Cheng, Sushobhan Ghosh, Peitong Duan, HungShi Lin, Abhishek Sundararajan, Shreyash Pandey, Huan Sun, Jeffrey Nichols, Eldon Schoop. iPrefBench: A User-Centric Benchmark for Personalized Mobile Use Agents. 2026. arXiv preprint.
Jenny T. Liang, Titus Barik, Jeffrey Nichols, Eldon Schoop, Ruijia Cheng. AgentBuilder: Exploring Scaffolds for Prototyping User Experiences of Interface Agents. 2025. arXiv preprint.
Tiffany Tseng, Ruijia Cheng, Jeffrey Nichols. Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models. 2024. arXiv preprint.
Short Papers, Posters, and Workshop Papers
Ruijia Cheng, Alison Smith-Renner, Ke Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes. Trust and Reliance in Human-AI Collaborative Text Summarization. 2022. Workshop paper in the Trust and Reliance in Human-AI Teams workshop in the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022).
Ruijia Cheng, Jan De Castro, Steven Dow, Joel Chan. 2018. An Exploratory Study of Problem Framing in Distributed Collaborative Design. Short paper in the ACM Group Conference (Group 2018).
Fiza Singh, Amanda Smith, Nick Dudeck, Eduardo Herrera, Jade Lee, Zinong Yang, Ruijia Cheng, Jaime Pineda. 2016. A Pilot Study to Assess the Effects of EEG-Gamma Neurofeedback on Working Memory in Schizophrenia Patients. Poster in the Society for Neuroscience 2016 Annual Conference (SfN 2016).
