Welcome to Owen’s website!

I am Owen Xingjian Zhang, a CS grad student at Princeton University. Currently, I am interested in Social Computing and Human Computer Interaction(HCI), working with Prof. Andrés Monroy-Hernández at Princeton HCI. I graduated from UIUC in 2023, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Karrie Karahalios at Social Space Lab and Prof. Brian Bailey at Orchid Lab. Before coming to US, I studied in Hong Kong and I was born in Guiyang, China.

Research Interests

Social Computing, Social Media, Mental Health, Human-AI Interaction, Decentralization, Computational Social Science

I have a broad interest in these areas, and at a deeper level, I am eager to explore answers to the following questions:

1. How can we design scalable and accessible mental health services using the power of emerging technologies like Generative AI?

2. What are the challenges and opportunities for the future of social media, especially on decentralized platforms?

3. What is the best way for AI to emulate and interact with humans to provide support that feels genuinely human-like?

Currently, I am searching for HCI-related PhD positions 2025 Fall.

About my name

Most of people call me Owen, but I would like to introduce my Chinese name: 行健(Xingjian). Fun fact: there is another Chinese-French novelist shares the same name, and he is the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2000, the year I was born. “Xingjian” means the strong and robust movement as a requirement for gentlemen, which comes from a quote in I Ching, a 3000-year-old ancient Chinese divination. Example: The full sentence: