Jinda Zhang

Hi there👋, I am a Doctoral Candidate at University of Victoria, affiliated with the SLangLab, the MOD(ularity) Squad, Human AI Lab. I am co-advised by Aanchan Mohan, Yvonne Coady. I work closely with Mirjana Prpa, Derek Jacoby.

I was Research Assistant advised by Mirjana Prpa, building LLM Agent in social VR. I was Research Assistant during Khoury Research Apprenticeship. My work has been published in high-impact conferences such as Interspeech, CHI, IEEE ICC.

If you're interested in discussing research or would like any advice I might be able to offer, feel free to book a chat here.

Email  /  Github

Research

I work on Speech Language Perception, Human AI Perception.

We introduce a novel phoneme-oriented multi-encoder ASR architecture that integrates a dedicated phoneme encoder with a traditional acoustic encoder.

This algorithm reduces prompt overlap and highlights that SOTA ASR models yield high word error rates for speakers with both mild and severe dysarthria.

We introduce the design and evaluation of an LLM-based AI agent for human-agent interaction in Virtual Reality (VR).

Short Papers, Workshops & Pre-prints

D Jacoby, K Smith, N Inbar, C Farr, J Wong, S Khutorna, T Fang, Z Li, J Zhang, and Y Coady. Digital storytelling with the Royal BC Museum. Appy Hour, SIGGRAPH 2025.

J Zhang, Enhancing Tree Type Detection in Forest Fire Risk Assessment: Multi-Stage Approach and Color Encoding with Forest Fire Risk Evaluation Framework for UAV Imagery.

Misc

When I am not coding or reading papers, I enjoy math competition puzzles, reading, and playing chess.