Zihan Gao

Logo Meow

PhD Candidate
Information School
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706

Email: zihan [dot] gao [at] wisc [dot] edu

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About me

I am a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Dr. Jacob Thebault-Spieker. My research is at the intersection of Human-AI Interaction and Location-based Computing, with a current focus on LLM alignment and mitigating geographic bias in generative models [NeurIPS ‘25 Workshop][AAAI ‘26][CSCW’26]. My background includes building and evaluating human-AI collaborative systems [CIKM ‘21], modeling user behavior [CSCW ‘24a][CSCW ‘24b], and developing computational systems for understanding “localness” [Preprint][CSCW ‘25 Companion][1 work in submission]. Prior to UW-Madison, I received my B.S. in Information Science and Psychology from Peking University, where I researched online discussion quality with Dr. Pengyi Zhang [ASIS&T ‘21].

🚀 I am on the Job Market (2026): Seeking both Academia and Industry roles. I’d love to chat about my work on local AI and potential opportunities 👉 ✉️.


Publications/Preprints

Is Your Chatbot a Tourist or a Townie?
Is Your Chatbot a Tourist or a Townie? Quantifying Geographic and Localness Disparities in LLM Representations of Place
Zihan Gao, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
ACM CSCW 2026 (To Appear)
LocalBench
LocalBench: Benchmarking LLMs on County-Level Local Knowledge and Reasoning
Zihan Gao, Yifei Xu, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
AAAI 2026
PDF
Collective Narrative Grounding
Collective Narrative Grounding: Community-Coordinated Data Contributions to Improve Local AI Systems
Zihan Gao*, Mohsin Yar Khan Yousufi*, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action
PDF Poster
From Fact-Checking to Narrative Grounding
From Fact-Checking to Narrative Grounding: Toward Local Narrative Infrastructures for Epistemic Justice
Zihan Gao, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
ACM CSCW 2025 Workshop on Beyond Information
PDF
From Clips to Communities
From Clips to Communities: Fusing Social Video into Knowledge Graphs for Localness-Aware LLMs
Zihan Gao, Jiaying "Lizzy" Liu, Yifei Xu, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
ACM CSCW 2025 Companion
PDF
A Turing Test for Localness
A Turing Test for ''Localness'': Conceptualizing, Defining, and Recognizing Localness in People and Machines
Zihan Gao, Justin Cranshaw, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
Preprint
PDF
Journeying Through Sense of Place
Journeying Through Sense of Place with Mental Maps: Characterizing Changing Spatial Understanding and Sense of Place During Migration for Work
Zihan Gao, Justin Cranshaw, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
ACM CSCW 2024
PDF
Investigating Influential Users' Responses
Investigating Influential Users' Responses to Permanent Suspension on Social Media
Zihan Gao, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
ACM CSCW 2024
PDF
Evaluating Human-AI Hybrid Conversational Systems
Evaluating Human-AI Hybrid Conversational Systems with Chatbot Message Suggestions
Zihan Gao, Jiepu Jiang
ACM CIKM 2021
PDF
Exploring How Topic Characteristics Influence
Exploring How Topic Characteristics Influence Online Discussion Quality
Jieli Liu, Zihan Gao, Pengyi Zhang
ASIS&T 2021
PDF

* co-first author

Teaching

TA in UW-Madison IS Dept since 2022, courses include:
LIS 461 - Data and Algorithms: Ethics and Policy
CS472/272/LIS472 - Introduction to Web Development