About me

I am a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Dr. Jacob Thebault-Spieker. My research is at the intersection of Human-AI Interaction and Location-based Computing, with a current focus on LLM alignment and mitigating geographic bias in generative models [NeurIPS ‘26 Workshop][2 works in submission]. My background includes building and evaluating human-AI collaborative systems [CIKM ‘21], modeling user behavior [CSCW ‘24a][CSCW ‘24b], and developing computational systems for understanding “localness” [Preprint][CSCW ‘25 Companion][1 work in submission]. Prior to UW-Madison, I received my B.S. in Information Science and Psychology from Peking University, where I researched online discussion quality with Dr. Pengyi Zhang [ASIS&T ‘21].

I’m on the job market!

Publications/Preprints

Collective Narrative Grounding: Community-Coordinated Data Contributions to Improve Local AI Systems
Zihan Gao*, Mohsin Yar Khan Yousufi*, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action (To Appear)

From Fact-Checking to Narrative Grounding: Toward Local Narrative Infrastructures for Epistemic Justice
Zihan Gao, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
CSCW 2025 Workshop on Beyond Information (To Appear)

From Clips to Communities: Fusing Social Video into Knowledge Graphs for Localness-Aware LLMs
Zihan Gao, Jiaying “Lizzy” Liu, Yifei Xu, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
CSCW 2025 Companion pdf

A Turing Test for ‘‘Localness’’: Conceptualizing, Defining, and Recognizing Localness in People and Machines
Zihan Gao, Justin Cranshaw, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
Preprint pdf

Journeying Through Sense of Place with Mental Maps: Characterizing Changing Spatial Understanding and Sense of Place During Migration for Work
Zihan Gao, Justin Cranshaw, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
CSCW 2024 pdf

Investigating Influential Users’ Responses to Permanent Suspension on Social Media
Zihan Gao, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
CSCW 2024 pdf

Evaluating Human-AI Hybrid Conversational Systems with Chatbot Message Suggestions
Zihan Gao, Jiepu Jiang
CIKM 2021 pdf

Exploring How Topic Characteristics Influence Online Discussion Quality
Jieli Liu, Zihan Gao, Pengyi Zhang
ASIS&T 2021 pdf

* co-first author

Teaching

TA in UW-Madison IS Dept since 2022, courses include:
LIS 461 - Data and Algorithms: Ethics and Policy
CS472/272/LIS472 - Introduction to Web Development