Yuqing Kyra Xing  ·  USC Rossier  ·  AI in Education

I study & design the relationship between people and AI.

Co-writing

Youcontrol
AIreliance
You 68AI 32

Prototype — the two minds are wired into the control. Drag the seam or use ← →: push toward AI and watch the human mind disperse as control flows across. Scroll ↓ for the next page.

Research · the through-line

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

  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

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. 01iOS

    食单 Shidan Design · MVP

    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. 02Web

    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. 03PWA

    Tempo

    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. 04macOS

    Readiness

    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. 05macOS

    Literatureness

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