Shuning Zhang

Ph.D. Student, Tsinghua University

Shuning Zhang

I am a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University. My research focuses on human-AI interaction, with an emphasis on safety, privacy, and security. I study how people perceive and collaborate with AI systems, then develop human-in-the-loop techniques to make these systems more usable and trustworthy.

I am advised by Prof. Xin Yi. During my undergraduate study at Tsinghua, I worked with Prof. Yuanchun Shi and Prof. Xin Yi. I have also worked with research groups at Stanford University, the University of Washington, and UCLA.

Email CV Scholar GitHub
Job market: I am open to faculty and industry research positions. Please feel free to get in touch by email.

🏆 Awards

Research Interests

My work sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, usable privacy and security, and AI systems. Recent projects study privacy-aware web agents, human-AI co-creation, privacy policy comprehension, synthetic speech deception, misinformation detection, and AI-assisted decision making.

Selected Publications

Alignment for Privacy, Security, and Personal Agency

  1. PrivWeb: Unobtrusive and Content-aware Privacy Protection for Web Agents Shuning Zhang*, Yutong Jiang*, Rongjun Ma, Yuting Yang, Mingyao Xu, Zhixin Huang, Xin Yi, Hewu Li CHI 2026
  2. VisGuardian: A Lightweight Group-based Visual Privacy Control Technique for Smart Glasses in Home Environments Shuning Zhang, Qucheng Zang, Yongquan 'Owen' Hu, Jiachen Du, Xueyang Wang, Yan Kong, Xinyi Fu, Suranga Nanayakkara, Xin Yi, Hewu Li CHI 2026
  3. A Scoping Review and Guidelines on Privacy Policy's Visualization from an HCI Perspective Shuning Zhang, Eve He, Sixing Tao, Yuting Yang, Ying Ma, Ailei Wang, Xin Yi, Hewu Li CHI 2026
  4. "Privacy across the boundary": Examining Perceived Privacy Risk Across Data Transmission and Sharing Ranges of Smart Home Personal Assistants Shuning Zhang, Shixuan Li, Haobin Xing, Jiarui Liu, Yan Kong, Xin Yi, Kanye Ye Wang, Hewu Li CHI 2026
  5. Designing Reflective Thinking-Based Contextual Privacy Policy for Mobile Applications Shuning Zhang, Sixing Tao, Eve He, Yuting Yang, Ying Ma, Ailei Wang, Xin Yi, Hewu Li PETS 2026
  6. PrivCAPTCHA: Interactive CAPTCHA to Facilitate Effective Comprehension of APP Privacy Policy Shuning Zhang, Xin Yi, Shixuan Li, Haobin Xing, Hewu Li CHI 2025
  7. Evaluating the Privacy Valuation of Personal Data on Smartphones Lihua Fan*, Shuning Zhang*, Yan Kong, Xin Yi, Yang Wang, Xuhai "Orson" Xu, Chun Yu, Hewu Li, Yuanchun Shi IMWUT 2024

Human-AI Interaction and Reliable Sensing

  1. Exploring Collaboration Patterns and Strategies in Human-AI Co-creation Through the Lens of Agency Shuning Zhang, Hui Wang, Xin Yi CSCW 2025
  2. Actual Achieved Gain and Optimal Perceived Gain: Modeling Human Take-over Decisions Towards Automated Vehicles' Suggestions Shuning Zhang, Xin Yi, Shixuan Li, Chuye Hong, Gujun Chen, Jiarui Liu, Xueyang Wang, Yongquan Hu, Yuntao Wang, Hewu Li CHI 2025
  3. The Manipulative Power of Voice Characteristics: Investigating Deceptive Patterns in Mandarin Chinese Female Synthetic Speech Shuning Zhang*, Han Chen*, Yabo Wang, Yiqun Xu, Jiaqi Bai, Yuanyuan Wu, Shixuan Li, Xin Yi, Hewu Li IMWUT 2025
  4. The Pervasive Blind Spot: Benchmarking VLM Inference Risks on Everyday Personal Videos Shuning Zhang, Zhaoxin Li, Changxi Wen, Ying Ma, Simin Li, Gengrui Zhang, Ziyi Zhang, Yibo Meng, Hantao Zhao, Xin Yi, Hewu Li IMWUT 2026

Education and Experience

Sep. 2023 - Present

Tsinghua University

Ph.D. student, Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace.

Sep. 2019 - Jun. 2023

Tsinghua University

Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology.

Jun. 2025 - Aug. 2025

Tencent CDG

Research internship on multi-agent retrieval and generation frameworks for Text2SQL and Text2DSL.

Mar. 2024 - Jun. 2024

ByteDance

Research internship on math-solving models with process-oriented reward and rejection fine-tuning.

Jun. 2022 - Aug. 2022

Stanford University

Remote research assistant role on multimodal app development.

Jun. 2022 - Aug. 2022

University of Washington

Remote research assistant role on physiological signal modeling for emotion classification.

Jun. 2021 - Aug. 2021

UCLA

Remote research assistant role on template-based NER model transferability.