ABOUT

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Information, University of Maryland, College Park, where I work with my advisor Dr. Ge Gao.

My research interest lies in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). In particular, I apply mixed methods to understand and design emerging technologies that support two groups in the context of cross-lingual communication:

1) Immigrants in the U.S.: New immigrants need various information to navigate their daily lives in society. Through conducting in-depth interviews, we uncover several challenges in immigrants’ information practices by incorporating the perspective of their information providers. This research sheds light on the design of future information technologies that facilitate connections between immigrants and their potential information providers [iConference 2024].

My recent research project explored how immigrants interact with news, one important information source, with the assistance of an LLM-based chatbot. Through comparing their interactions with those of local residents, my study highlights critical differences between these social groups in how they leverage language technology for everyday information seeking [CHI 2025].

2) Globally distributed teams: One of the challenges hindering successful global teamwork is the inadequate exchange of contextual information among distributed units. This issue is particularly pronounced when these teams operate in different working languages locally. Our research includes a series of controlled experiments to understand how language technologies can be designed to support team collaboration [CSCW 2022; CHI EA 2021].

Previously, I obtained a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (电子科技大学). I was lucky to be an undergraduate research assistant supervised by Dr. Haiyi Zhu and Dr. Lana Yarosh at Grouplens Research.

NEWS

Sep 2025: Our paper on understanding lay users’ trust on machine translation is accepted to EMNLP 25!

Sep 2025: Presented our poster with Yimin Xiao and Dayeon Ki to share our recent project collaborating with Language Science Station.

March 2025: Awarded the prestigious Wylie Dissertation Fellowship from UMD’s Graduate School!

Feb 2025: Our paper “The News Says, the Bot Says: How Immigrants and Locals Differ in Chatbot-Facilitated News Reading” got accepted to CHI 2025.

Jun 2024: Started my UX research intern at eBay in San Jose, CA!

Nov 2023: Our paper “Assisting International Migrants with Everyday Information Seeking: From the Providers’ Lens” got accepted to iConference 2024.

GET IN TOUCH

Email: yongle[at]umd[dot]edu
Check my LinkedIn and Google Scholar page below:

• LinkedIn
• Google