I'm a developer and interaction designer. I build research tools and interactive websites, often working with researchers and historians.
Some projects take physical form as installations. Here you'll find selected work, demos, and papers.
2025–present
Our team built a framework for studying persuasive language. It measures 15 dimensions through 55 features, giving researchers specific measurements they can inspect and compare.
I'm the lead computational developer and a co-author. I built the Python package, CLI, API, and web interface, along with evaluation workflows.
Published at EMNLP 2026.
Princeton Research Computing / 2024–2025
Thousands of figures from scientific papers, collected in a space you can move through.
How do you look through thousands of scientific figures without opening every paper?
I co-developed Vis-Sieve to extract figures from papers, classify them with a multimodal model, and browse the results in linked 2D and 3D views. I worked on the data pipeline, interfaces, and evaluation of the model's labels.
The first browser architecture needed roughly 500 MB of data. I reworked the data path with DuckDB and Parquet, bringing the payload to about 7 MB while keeping exploration in the browser.
The project became my ITP thesis and a first-author paper at PEARC 2025.
NYU Colonial Networks / 2024–2026
A painting's ownership history can lead from a Paris collection to colonial trade in Saint-Domingue.
I worked with historians to build nine public research narratives about those connections. The text sits alongside maps, timelines, and networks, so readers can follow the story and examine the records behind it.
I led the design and development, including the data model, processing scripts, and deployment.
When a visitor approaches, the projected sustainability claims disappear. The hanging letters cast a different word on the wall: WASTE.
I designed and made the installation with laser-cut wood, textiles, ten servo motors, Arduinos, and computer vision.
Watch the installation
A browser-based meeting room you move through, built with Three.js and peer-to-peer voice. I designed and developed it independently.
Enter the roomA StoryMap following 13 enslaved people through eighteenth-century Paris. I built the web narrative around archival biographies and a georeferenced map of the city from 1775.
Read their storiesEMNLP 2026 · Main Conference
Liancheng Gong, Zhiyang Wang, Yiwei Xu, Julia Mendelsohn
PEARC 2025 · ACM
Zhiyang Wang, Devin Bayly, Carolina Roe-Raymond
I've supported students working with code, physical computing, and interactive media, from their first JavaScript sketches to capstone projects.