Notes on Reading, Writing, and Thinking with AI
Joseph Chee Chang
I am a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) working on the Asta project. I received my PhD from the Language Technologies Institute and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
My research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and AI, with the goal of building systems that help people navigate, understand, and synthesize large amounts of information. I primarily publish in HCI venues (e.g., CHI, UIST) and occationally in NLP conferences (e.g., ACL, COLM).
I have several active research threads: developing LLM-powered literature review tools and deep research systems, building AI-augmented reading interfaces that make scholarly papers interactive and intelligent, and studying broad human-AI collaboration to design effective partnerships between people and AI agents. Recently, I have also focused on interactive causal knowledge graphs and literature-based ideation and theory development. Previously, my research has also focused on crowdsourcing and human computation — using crowds to synthesize search results into coherent articles — and web browsing and online research tools that help consumers navigate thousands of reviews and online sources to make confident decisions.
Active Research Topics
- Deep Research and AI Lit Review Tools
- AI-Augmented Reading Interfaces
- Understanding Human-AI Interaction
- Social Computing for the Research Community
- New: Interactive Causal Knowledge Graphs
Come Work With Me
I am actively looking for research interns to join my group at the Allen Institute for AI. Interns work closely with me and a small group of co-mentors on a focused research project, typically resulting in a publication at a top venue. I typically mentor HCI interns, but also co-mentor NLP/ML interns.
Past interns have published at top venues such as CHI, UIST, ACL, and COLM, and have come from institutions across the world including UW, KAIST, U of Toronto, and MIT.
Interested? Learn more and apply.
Find Me
Recent Activities
CHI 2026 — Barcelona, Spain. Kevin will present our paper Cocoa: Co-Planning and Co-Execution with AI Agents and I will host a workshop on Augmenting Reading
COLM 2025 — Montreal, Canada. I presented our paper LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions
ACL 2025 — Vienna, Austria. I gave a tutorial on Human-AI Collaboration: How AIs Augment Human Teammates and presented our demo Ai2 Scholar QA
CHI 2025 — Yokohama, Japan. Kevin presented our paper IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets with Literature-Grounded Feedback and Ruotong presented Social-RAG: Retrieving from Group Interactions to Socially Ground AI Generation
The Birder's Column
When not building AI tools, I can often be found in the forests and wetlands of the Pacific Northwest with a camera and a long lens. I recently became an avid birder, and am slowly building a photography portfolio of the region's incredible avian diversity.
Photo: Short-eared Owl, Skagit Valley