Jinda Zhang

Hi there👋, I am a graduate student at University of Victoria, affiliated with the SLangLab, PathOnAI, Human AI Lab. I am co-advised by Aanchan Mohan, Yvonne Coady. I work closely with Mirjana Prpa.

I was Research Assistant advised by Mirjana Prpa. 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

News

September 2025: I will be joining [Placeholder] as Machine Learning Engineer Intern starting this Fall.
May 2025: I will be joining Ansys/Synopsys as R&D Engineer Intern starting this Summer.
Apr 2025: Our paper Towards atypical speech transcription using LLM-based ASR was accepted to Interspeech 25!
March 2025: I will be joining Human-AI Lab as a Research Intern, working on Human Computer Interaction with VR.
Jan 2025: Our paper on Enhancing AAC Software for Dysarthric Speakers in e-Health Settings: An Evaluation Using TORGO was accepted to IEEE ICC 25!
Feb 2024: Our paper on Building LLM-based AI Agents in Social Virtual Reality was accepted to CHI 24!
October 2023: I will be joining SLangLab as a Research Assistant, working on Speech and NLP.

Research

I work on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing.

Towards atypical speech transcription using LLM-based ASR
Jinda Zhang, Aanchan Mohan
Interspeech 25 (Oral)
Paper

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

Enhancing AAC Software for Dysarthric Speakers in e-Health Settings: An Evaluation Using TORGO
Macarious Hui, Jinda Zhang, Aanchan Mohan
IEEE ICC 25
Paper

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

Building LLM-based AI Agents in Social Virtual Reality
Hongyu Wan, Jinda Zhang, Abdulaziz Arif Suria, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang, Yvonne Coady, Mirjana Prpa
CHI LBW 24
Paper / Demo

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

More Research

D Jacoby, K Smith, N Inbar, C Farr, J Wong, S Khutorna, T Fang, Z Li, J Zhang, and Y Coady. Tech Tales: 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.

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