🎉 MASCOT accepted to the EMNLP 2026 Main Conference
MASCOT, our multi-agent socio-collaborative companion framework, was accepted to the EMNLP 2026 Main Conference.
☕️About Me
Yiyang “Diana” Wang is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, working in the Ka Moamoa Lab with Prof. Josiah Hester. She researches human-centered AI alignment for large language models and agentic systems: she studies how AI systems behave and fail in social and collaborative settings, and develops post-training, evaluation, and interaction methods that make them more reliable, steerable, and responsive to human needs.
A central thread of her work is designing and evaluating multi-agent systems that are collaborative, reliable, and grounded in human needs. She has built socio-collaborative AI companions that stay in character and contribute meaningfully (MASCOT, EMNLP 2026 Main; CompanionCast; and CultivAgents), as well as LLM-agent frameworks to study complex social dynamics (AgentReview, EMNLP 2024 Oral). She also advances the foundation-model stack itself — from robustness and prompt optimization for large language models (TextReg) to efficient self-distillation for LLMs (UniSD).
Complementing this, she develops multimodal sensing and machine learning systems for health and social good, translating raw signals into actionable insight — for example, fine-grained nicotine-intake estimation for smoking-cessation support (PuffEM, IEEE/ACM CHASE 2025). Across projects, she pairs rigorous evaluation and human-centered design with practical engineering (Python, ML pipelines, on-device systems) to ship research that drives product and real-world impact.
She is currently an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon (since August 2026), following a research internship at Microsoft AI / Microsoft Research on AI agents in health (Summer 2026), a Ph.D. research internship at Dolby (2025), and software engineering internships at Amazon (×2) and HubSpot. She is actively seeking AI research / applied scientist internship and full-time opportunities, and is always glad to discuss new ideas and collaborations. ☕️
Interests
- Human-Centered AI Alignment
- Large Language Models and LLM Agents
- Multi-Agent Systems
- AI Safety and Trustworthy AI
- AI for Health
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology
Master of Human-Computer Interaction
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology
Featured Research
Publications
(2026).
CultivAgents: Cultivating Relationship-Centered Multi-Agent Systems for Personalized Gardening.
arXiv.
(2026).
TextReg: Mitigating Prompt Distributional Overfitting via Regularized Text-Space Optimization.
arXiv.
(2026).
MASCOT: Multi-Agent Socio-Collaborative Companion Systems.
EMNLP 2026 Main.
(2025).
CompanionCast: A Multi-Agent Conversational AI Framework with Spatial Audio for Social Co-Viewing Experiences.
ACM AI Leadership Summit.
(2025).
PuffEM: An E-cigarette Sleeve for Estimating User Nicotine Intake.
CHASE ‘25.
(2025).
Eliciting Design Guidelines of Paper-Based Tactile Interfaces for Eyes-Free Scenarios.
TEI 2025.
(2024).
AgentReview: Exploring Peer Review Dynamics with LLM Agents.
EMNLP 2024 (Oral).
(2024).
Scito2M: A 2 Million, 30-Year Cross-disciplinary Dataset for Temporal Scientometric Analysis.
Good Data @ AAAI 2025.
(2024).
Phantom Puffs: A Phantom Lung to Emulate Smoking Behavior.
OJRAT.
(2022).
Flexible Computational Photodetectors for Self-Powered Activity Sensing.
npj Flex. Electron..
(2020).
OptoSense: Towards Ubiquitous Self-Powered Ambient Light Sensing Surfaces.
IMWUT 2020.
Experience
Applied Scientist Intern
Amazon- Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, Seattle, WA.
Research Intern
Microsoft AI / Microsoft Research- Research Intern in Redmond, WA, working on AI agents in health.
Ph.D. Research Intern
Dolby Laboratories- Developed CompanionCast, a multi-agent conversational AI framework designed to enhance social co-viewing experiences through LLM-driven companion agents.
- Integrated spatial audio processing into a multi-agent system to create immersive, realistic social interactions in group entertainment settings.
- Implemented an LLM-as-the-judge evaluation pipeline to iterate on agent alignment and conversational quality.
Research
Meta x CMU MHCI Capstone- Designed and prototyped Nova, an LLM-based knowledge assistant for data center operations, integrating retrieval-augmented generation with human-centered AI workflows to support domain-specific knowledge access, technical decision-making, and cross-team collaboration.
Software Development Engineer Intern
Amazon - AGI Foundations- Delivered E2E pipeline using AWS (Lambda, State Machines) for natural language understanding models’ test set release that reduced manual effort and total testing time by 50%
Software Development Engineer Intern
Amazon- Optimized automated long-running end-to-end integration tests for internal model release pipeline to a single command on cloud terminal and shortened manual testing time by 8 hours
Software Engineer Co-op
HubSpot- Delivered Zoom call transcription service to more than 121,000 customers across more than 120 countries and improved conference archive and content accessibility
Software Engineer Intern
Cognosos- Enhanced customers’ portal experience in tracking over 100,000 assets across multiple industries at a start-up
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of TechnologySchool of Interactive Computing. Research in the Ka Moamoa Lab, advised by Prof. Josiah Hester.Master of Human-Computer Interaction
Carnegie Mellon UniversityGPA: 3.99/4.00. Research in the WInE Lab on human-in-the-loop alignment and uncertainty calibration for code-generating LLMs, advised by Prof. Sherry Tongshuang Wu.B.S. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of TechnologyThreads: Intelligence and People. Cumulative GPA: 3.94/4.00, Major GPA: 4.00/4.00. Undergraduate research advised by Prof. Gregory Abowd and Prof. Jennifer Kim.
Awards
Mini-Seed Grant ($5,000)
College of Computing, Georgia Tech / Dolby ∙
September 2025
Co-wrote the proposal with my advisor; awarded $5,000.
NSF Student Travel Award
IEEE/ACM CHASE ∙
June 2025
1st Place, Graduate Poster Symposium (Junior Student category)
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology ∙
May 2025
Core77 Design Awards
Core77 ∙
June 2022
Member of the project team for PITAS.
Selected Participant, Global Young Scientists Summit
National Research Foundation, Singapore ∙
January 2022
1 of 1,000 selected participants, nominated by Student Innovation & Undergraduate Research, Georgia Tech.
President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) — Salary Award
Georgia Tech ∙
September 2021
1 of 80 undergraduate awardees in Fall 2021 to receive a stipend for conducting research.
Undergraduate Student Researcher Making an Impact
Georgia Tech ∙
June 2021
Grace Hopper Celebration Student Registration Scholarship
AnitaB.org ∙
September 2020
Dean’s List
Georgia Tech ∙
May 2019
Recent News
🚀 Joined Microsoft Research as a Research Intern
Started a research internship at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA for Summer 2026.
🌱 New preprint — CultivAgents
Released CultivAgents, a relationship-centered multi-agent system for personalized gardening.
📝 New preprint — TextReg
Co-authored TextReg, a method for mitigating prompt distributional overfitting.
📝 New preprint — UniSD
Co-authored UniSD, a unified self-distillation framework for large language models.
Visitors
