PhD Defense: Mediating Complexity: Reasoning Layers from Embodied Interaction to Agentic Systems

Yuran’s PhD explores how intelligent systems can act as reasoning layers that mediate between human intent and low-level system signals in complex workflows. Across projects spanning embodied interaction, multimodal presentation systems, and ML system optimization, I derive empirical findings about how systems can encode action through form, couple feedback to user action, fuse heterogeneous signals for intent inference, and act autonomously for assisting humans in explainable ways.