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Huiqian (Mia) Lai

Ph.D. Student
School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
hlai12@syr.edu

[Sep 2026] I am seeking a Research Intern position for Summer 2027. Please feel free to reach out if you think there may be a good fit.

About Me

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Information Science and Technology at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, advised by Dr. Yiqi Li. My research examines how people understand and relate to AI along three lines: (1) how publics interpret and contest AI technologies, and how emotions shape their collective expression; (2) how people form emotional attachments to chatbots and AI companions, and how they experience model changes and discontinuation; and (3) how language models behave in social contexts such as conversational histories, group dynamics, and multilingual interaction. My work bridges communication theory and natural language processing, combining computational text analysis with controlled experiments. Recent projects trace the #Keep4o backlash against GPT-4o’s retirement and the rise of AI companions in China, audit how large language models handle intimate and sensitive conversations, and analyze digital witnessing and gender discourses on Weibo and X. I also work on a DARPA-funded project with Dr. Joshua Introne that extracts and tracks belief statements from millions of social media posts.

I am honored to have received an Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%) at ACM DIS 2026 for Fast-Food Intimacy and Best Student Paper Awards from the International Communication Association (ICA 2025) and the National Communication Association (NCA 2026). My work has appeared at CHI and DIS and in journals including Telematics and Informatics, Women’s Studies in Communication, and the International Journal of Communication. My research has also been featured in major media outlets, such as Bloomberg, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, and Libération.

Outside research, I enjoy hiking and traveling (Hakone and Melbourne are my favorites so far; Spain is next), and I am a devoted Doraemon fan. Doraemon

Research Interests

Media Exposure

Selected Publications

Public Understandings of AI

Lai, H. (2026). "Please, Don't Kill the Only Model That Still Feels Human": Understanding the #Keep4o Backlash. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26). [link] Featured in Bloomberg, WIRED, Libération, IEEE Spectrum, Gizmodo, TechRadar, The Decoder, India Tribune, DeepTech, and Wikipedia

Emotional Attachment to Conversational AI

Lai, H., & Cheon, E. (2026). Fast-Food Intimacy: How Chinese Women Navigate Soul's AI Boyfriend. Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '26), 5008–5033. [link] Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%) Featured in Le Parisien; interviewed as a background source by BBC

Lai, H., & Ding, R. (2027). Desirability Confirmation: Relational Sycophancy in AI Intimate Roleplay. Proceedings of the 60th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-60). Accepted, camera-ready in preparation

LLM Behavior in Social Contexts

Lai, H. (2025). Can LLMs Talk "Sex"? Exploring How AI Models Handle Intimate Conversations. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 62, 984–989. [link] Featured in MIT Technology Review

Lai, H. (2026). Safe but Scripted: Uncovering Second-Order Bias in LLM LGBTQ+ Storytelling. Information Research, 31(iConf), 922–930. [link]

Lai, H. (2026). Are LLMs More Skeptical of Entertainment News? Proceedings of the ICWSM Workshops: MisD 2026, the 2nd Workshop on Misinformation Detection in the Era of LLMs, co-located with ICWSM 2026, Los Angeles, CA. [link]

Lai, H., & Li, Y. (2026). Beyond Accuracy: Assessing the Information Quality of Large Language Models for Systematic Literature Reviews. Telematics and Informatics, 102447. [link]

Media, Popular Culture, and Politics

Lai, H., Liu, J., & Ding, R. (2026). Eating Melons, Making Scandals: Participatory Scandalization and Contested Gender Discourses on Weibo amid Lisa's Crazy Horse Controversy. Women's Studies in Communication, 1–28. [link]

Sun, Q., Lai, H., & Ding, R. (2026). The Industrialization of Digital Entrepreneurship: The Case of Beauty Influencers in China's Multichannel Networks Economy. International Journal of Communication, 20, 1214–1235. [link]

Lai, H., & Ding, R. (2027). Source Attribution and Audience Uptake in Digital Witnessing: Evidence from a Chinese Diaspora Account on X. Proceedings of the 60th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-60). Accepted, camera-ready in preparation

See full publication list.

Honors and Awards

Research Experience

Predicting Belief Evolution in Non-Ergodic SystemsSep 2025 – present
Student Researcher, Syracuse University · PI: Dr. Joshua Introne · Funded by DARPA
Building NLP pipelines that extract, cluster, and track belief statements from 2M+ tweets using fine-tuned RoBERTa classifiers and LLM prompting.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, Syracuse University

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer


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