Yuqing Kyra Xing  ·  USC Rossier  ·  AI in Education

I study & design the relationship between people and AI.

Co-writing

Youcontrol
AIreliance
You 68AI 32

Drag the seam or use ← →: how much of your thinking would you hand over? Push toward AI and watch the human mind disperse. Scroll ↓ for the research.

Research · the through-line

Three threads, one question: when people and AI think together, who stays in control?

Select a thread to read its papers

  1. Writing & argument2025–present

    ABE: AI for Brainstorming & Editing

    A scaffolded AI writing coach, built into Google Docs, that positions generative AI as a critical reader, not a writer, guiding students through argumentation, perspective-taking, and iterative revision.

    USC ICT  ·  with Dr. Benjamin Nye & Dr. William Swartout

  2. Reliance & control2025–present

    Proxy efficacy: whose thinking is it?

    Extending Bandura's proxy agency to machines: a student's confidence that a GenAI tool can do their academic work on their behalf, measured across a national survey of 900 U.S. undergraduates.

    Higher education  ·  with Dr. Stephen J. Aguilar (advisor)

  3. Early learning2023–2025

    Conversational AI in early-childhood STEM

    73 children, ages 4–8, co-creating oral stories with an AI agent or a human partner: those with the AI gave briefer replies, those with a person told richer ones, mapping how a partner shapes a young storyteller.

    with Dr. Ying Xu  ·  Xuechen Liu

Next: the person behind the questions.

Off the record · in my own voice
Press play, the machine takes it down0:00 / 0:00

Live transcript · machine

Press play. The transcript writes itself as I talk.

About · why both

Most people either study AI or build with it. I do both, because it's the same question.

How much of our thinking do we hand to a machine, and how do we stay in the loop while we do it?

Yuqing Kyra Xing

Before any of this, I spent two years as a Spanish translator and simultaneous interpreter, the human proxy standing between people who couldn't understand each other.

Now I study AI as that proxy.

Yuqing (Kyra) Xing is a PhD student at USC's Rossier School of Education, and a mixed-methods researcher and UX designer. Her work follows one through-line: the human–AI relationship in learning: agency, reliance, control, and proxy efficacy, a learner's confidence in getting AI to act on their behalf. She moves fluently between statistics and thematic coding, and between a research question and a working prototype.

What I actually do

CV ↗ résumé ↗

  • Quant: multiple regression, ANOVA, multilevel models, structural equation modeling, survey & psychometric design, machine learning.
    Qual: inductive & deductive codebooks, thematic and narrative analysis, inter-rater reliability.

  • UI design and interaction prototyping (Figma, Webflow), plus UX research: surveys, user interviews, usability, thematic synthesis. Then builds the thing: ships AI-native products across iOS, macOS, and web: Swift/SwiftUI, React/TypeScript, Python, front-end HTML/CSS/JS, and the Claude API.

  • Teaching assistant for EDUC 599: AI and Learning Technologies, a graduate course in USC's M.Ed. in Learning Design & Technology, Fall 2025. Co-designed course materials (lecture slides, in-class activities), delivered class presentations, mentored students through AI-augmented learning-environment prototypes, and ran grading and weekly office hours.

The path

  • 2016–20

    B.A. Spanish · Shanghai Int'l Studies University

  • 2020–22

    Spanish translator & interpreter · Shanghai Electric

  • 2022–23

    M.A. Educational Studies · UMich Marsal

  • 2024–

    Ph.D. in Education · USC Rossier

Contact

Built · the other half

I don't just study the handoff. I ship it. Solo, AI-native products: I design and direct, the machine writes the code.

  1. Shidan app icon01iOS

    食单 Shidan Design · MVP Demo

    An AI cooking & grocery assistant for Chinese kitchens: dish ideas from what's already in the fridge, recipe capture by photo, voice, or OCR, auto-built shopping lists, and a step-by-step cook mode.

    SwiftUI · SwiftData · Claude API

  2. MeetSpan app icon02Web

    MeetSpan Live

    A no-login, cross-timezone meeting scheduler: everyone paints their availability in their own timezone; it finds the overlap, suggests alternatives, and drafts the invite email.

    React · TypeScript · Firebase · GitHub Pages

  3. Tempo app icon03PWA

    Tempo Live

    A two-mode daily planner and mindful diary, built on a hand-drawn pixel-art design system, with an AI assistant woven in.

    Python · Web · PWA

  4. Readiness app icon04macOS

    Readiness Gallery

    A reading coach for English learners: inline word lookup, a growing vocabulary notebook, AI reading help, and newsletter subscriptions pulled straight from the inbox.

  5. Literatureness app icon05macOS

    Literatureness Gallery

    A research-reading companion: syncs with Zotero, pulls in Google Scholar alerts, and reads papers alongside you with AI.

  6. Café Focus Room app icon06Web

    Café Focus Room Live

    A virtual café you step into to focus: order a drink, choose a seat, set a task, and run a timed session inside a hand-drawn scene with ambient café sound. Bilingual English and 中文.

    React · Vite · GitHub Pages

Proxy Efficacy · a field explainer

When a student hands work to a machine, what kind of agency is that?

The field keeps asking whether AI helps or harms learning. That's the wrong question. The answer depends on a belief we don't yet measure.

Seven short steps, three you can play with: Bandura's three modes of agency, what proxy efficacy is (and is not), a calibration gauge you drag, and the fork where the same belief grows or erodes a student's own capability.

Read the explainer →