Runqi Zou
I'm a researcher and designer working across human-computer interaction and computational research. I'm currently a master's student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. I'm interested in cognition, behavior, and the ways intelligent systems influence how people perceive, decide, and interact. Across my projects, I focus on connecting technical implementation with questions about human experience.
Selected Work
LURK Werewolf: Linguistic Bias in LLMs Through Game Playing
→A Werewolf framework for testing whether LLM agents react to meaning or to wording.
How much does phrasing change what LLM players do in a social deduction game?
Floating Umbrella
→A robotic umbrella that hovers overhead and follows you as you walk, no free hand required.
A personal robotic umbrella that moves with you and stays overhead while walking.
Coming Soon
Language-Level Bias in LLM Social Deduction Games
Studying how differences in language style and proficiency affect perceived credibility and voting behavior in LLM-mediated social deduction games.
How language style and proficiency shape credibility judgments and vote patterns when LLMs play social deduction games.
Coming Soon
From Pattern Detection to Prediction in Probabilistic Sequences
Modeling sequential decision-making in cognitive tasks using Markov chain frameworks.
How people detect and predict patterns in sequences, modeled with Markov chains.
Aligned Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Social Sentiment Analysis
→A text-anchored information-bottleneck framework that aligns audio and visual signals to a language-centered semantic space and regulates fusion with an energy-adaptive low-rank Rényi bottleneck.
Multimodal sentiment analysis fusing video, audio, and text through an aligned information bottleneck.
PureMetric
→Real-time beverage freshness monitoring through in-vessel chemical sensing, cloud storage, and AI-assisted expiration forecasting.
Embedded sensor that tracks beverage freshness after opening, with real-time dashboard forecasting.
ZKP Dynamics
→A privacy-preserving Web3 asset verification platform. Zero-knowledge proofs let holders meet a collateral requirement without revealing balances, and each report is anchored on-chain for later verification.
Web3 platform that proves asset value using zero-knowledge proofs, without exposing wallet history.
Sound of Body
→A biometric installation that converts a person’s heart rate and blood pressure into a generative music track and projected visual composition.
Biometric installation that turns your heart rate and blood pressure into personalized music and visuals.
Sentverse
→A wearable olfactory communication system for capturing, sending, and receiving scent across distance.
Wearable device that captures scents and plays them back through electrical nasal stimulation.
Love Utopia
→A narrative RPG that turns romance into a task economy, using countdown rules and branching escape paths to satirize fast-food love.
Satirical RPG set in a town where romance runs on timed tasks and coin rewards, with a story about escape.
Publications & Manuscripts
† Equal contribution · * Corresponding authors
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LURK Werewolf: Linguistic Bias in Large Language Models Through Game Playing
IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2026) · Under Review
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Aligned Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Social Sentiment Analysis
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
Awards
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2025
International Design Awards, Honorable Mention
Product Design (Smart Home Products)
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2025
A' Design Award, Winner
Installation Design
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2024
Muse Award, Silver Winner
Product Design (Wearable Technologies)
Playground
A few other fun projects live here. Choose one from the list to open and try it.