Jinda Zhang

Hi there👋, I am a Doctoral Researcher at University of Victoria, affiliated with the SLangLab and the MOD(ularity) Squad. 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 in Vision Lab.

On the leadership side, I’ve mentored research teams and led weekly check-in meetings for Research Capstone Projects.

Email  /  Github

Research

I work on AI Agent, Speech Language Processing.

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).

Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-stage detectors and optimizations in improving the accuracy of forest fire risk assessment.

Selected Projects

This study uses machine learning and deep learning to analyze seasonal variations in wildfire prediction, focusing on key features such as temperature, wind speed, and NDVI.

Misc

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