Yuqing Kyra Xing 邢雨晴 About me ↗
Researcher & designer · USC Rossier · AI in Education

I study & design the relationship between people and AI.

How do we work with AI and stay authors of our own thinking? I explore that question through research, design, and things you can use.

Two minds, one handover Two heads face each other. As you hand thinking to AI, the human mind's organic lines disappear and the AI mind's structured network fills in. AI HUMAN AI
A mind of my own.A mind on my behalf.

“Help me think this through.”

Some of the work moves to AI. There is still a thought to follow, question, and make my own.

When I hand over the thinking, what stays with me?

Meet 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 →