I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer and Information Science at the
University of Pennsylvania, advised by Prof. Andrew Head.
My research bridges human-AI interaction and software engineering, focusing on
AI-powered programming assistants that answer complex developer questions
and enhance code understanding.
I design intelligent systems that combine large language models,
vision-language models, and agent-based analysis. My recent work includes Trailblazer, which uses
intelligent agents to trace program flow and explain behavior inside the IDE;
InvisibleMentor, developed during my internship at
Microsoft Research's PROSE team,
which uses VLMs to infer user actions from spreadsheet screen recordings and recommend improved
workflows; and Ivie, which
provides lightweight in-situ explanations for AI-generated code.
I completed my master's in Computational Science and Engineering at Harvard, advised by Prof. Elena Glassman, where I developed
interactive systems for code and model exploration, including ExampleNet and ParaLib.
Litao Yan, Jeffrey Tao, Lydia B Chilton,
Andrew Head
UIST'25
Litao Yan, Andrew Head, Ken Milne, Vu
Le, Sumit
Gulwani, Chris Parnin, Emerson Murphy-Hill
arXiv preprint
Jeffrey Tao, Litao Yan, Jessica Shi, Mia Ginsberg, Andrew Head
CHI'25
Litao Yan, Alyssa Hwang, Zhiyuan Wu,
Andrew Head
CHI'24
Litao Yan, Miryung Kim, Björn Hartmann, Tianyi Zhang, Elena Glassman
UIST'22
CHI 2021 Honorable Mention
Litao Yan, Elena
Glassman, Tianyi Zhang
CHI'21