Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications
Serious Games and AI
- Michael Shomoye, Richard Zhao. Automated Emotion Recognition of Students in Virtual Reality Classrooms. Computers & Education: X Reality. 5:2024, December, 2024. [Link]
- Hannah Ava Sloan, Richard Zhao, Faisal Aqlan, Hui Yang, Rui Zhu. Adaptive Virtual Assistant for Virtual Reality-based Remote Learning. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition (ASEE 2022) Proceedings. Minneapolis, USA, June, 2022. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Rachael Versaw, Samantha Schultz, Kevin Lu, Richard Zhao. Modular Reinforcement Learning Framework for Learners and Educators. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), virtual, August, 2021. [Link] [BibTeX]
Serious Games and Immersive Technologies
- Naznin Sharmin Shishir, Richard Zhao. Is the Jedi Force Pull Method Effective? Evaluating Eye-Tracked Object Grabbing in VR. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2025), Graz, Austria, April, 2025. [Link] Acceptance Rate: 48%.
- Farhan Aslam, Richard Zhao. Voice-Augmented Virtual Reality Interface for Serious Games. Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), Milan, Italy, August, 2024. [Link] [BibTeX] Acceptance Rate: 41.1%.
- Haedong Kim, Tyler Hartleb, Khalid Bello, Faisal Aqlan, Richard Zhao, Hui Yang. Behavioral Modeling of Collaborative Problem Solving in Multiplayer Virtual Reality Manufacturing Simulation Games. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering. 2023. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Tyler Hartleb, Haedong Kim, Richard Zhao, Faisal Aqlan, Hui Yang. Exploring Magic Interactions for Collaboration in Virtual Reality Learning Factory. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition (ASEE 2023) Proceedings, Baltimore, USA, June, 2023. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Rui Zhu, Faisal Aqlan, Richard Zhao, Hui Yang. Sensor-based Modeling of Problem-Solving in Virtual Reality Manufacturing Systems. Expert Systems with Applications, vol 201, p. 117220, 2022. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Faisal Aqlan, Richard Zhao. Assessment of Collaborative Problem Solving in Engineering Students Through Hands-On Simulations. IEEE Transactions on Education, 65:1, February, 2022, p9-17. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Rui Zhu, Faisal Aqlan, Richard Zhao, Hui Yang. Eye-Track Modeling of Problem-Solving in Virtual Manufacturing Environments. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition (ASEE 2021) Proceedings, virtual, July, 2021. [Link] [BibTeX]
Games and AI
- Kimiya Saadat, Richard Zhao. Enhancing Two-Player Performance Through Single-Player Knowledge Transfer: An Empirical Study on Atari 2600 Games. Proceedings of the Twentieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-24), Lexington, USA, November, 2024. [Link] Acceptance Rate: 26.5%.
- Mahdi Farrokhimaleki, Richard Zhao. Procedural Content Generation in Games: A Survey with Insights on Emerging LLM Integration. Proceedings of the Twentieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-24), Lexington, USA, November, 2024. [Link]
- Yiwei Zhang, Richard Zhao. Enhancing MCTS with Convolutional Autoencoder and Linear Approximator in XCOM-Inspired Environments. Proceedings of the Tenth AIIDE Workshop on Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games (EXAG), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, October, 2023. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Kimiya Saadat, Richard Zhao. Exploring Adaptive MCTS with TD Learning in miniXCOM. Proceedings of the Ninth AIIDE Workshop on Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games (EXAG), Pomona, California, USA, October, 2022. [Link] [BibTeX]
AI and Natural Language Generation
- Mohamad Elzohbi and Richard Zhao. Poems, Pulses and Polygons: How Classical Arabic Poetry Resonates with Music and Geometry. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Computational Linguistics (ACLing 2024), Dubai, UAE, September, 2024. [Link]
- Mohamad Elzohbi and Richard Zhao. Let the Poem Hit the Rhythm: Using a Byte-Based Transformer for Beat-Aligned Poetry Generation. Proceedings of 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), Jönköping, Sweden, June, 2024. [Link]
- Mohamad Elzohbi and Richard Zhao. ContrastWSD: Enhancing Metaphor Detection with Word Sense Disambiguation Following the Metaphor Identification Procedure. Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), Turin, Italy, May, 2024. [Link] [BibTeX]
- Mohamad Elzohbi and Richard Zhao. Creative Data Generation: A Review Focusing on Text and Poetry. Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), Waterloo, Canada, June, 2023. [Link] [BibTeX] Acceptance Rate: 36%.
Extended Abstracts
- Faisal Aqlan, Richard Zhao, Hui Yang, Sreekanth Ramakrishnan. A Virtual Learning Factory for Advanced Manufacturing. Proceedings of the 2020 Winter Simulation Conference, virtual, December, 2020. [Link]
Past Publications
