Beichen Xue

About Me

I am a Research Assistant in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, advised by Yue Jiang. I am broadly interested in understanding human perception and behavior at a fundamental level. My research examines how and why people direct their attention and act in certain ways when interacting with visual interfaces and visualizations. What people look at reflects a dynamic among visual salience, their sensemaking process, and the demands of the task. My research examines how people coordinate attention across these interwoven influences. I study task-driven human behavior through two connected threads:

1. Understanding how people look and interact. I run eye-tracking studies that capture how people interpret visualizations and interfaces. I also study multimodal signals such as physical activity (cursor movements) and cognitive activity (think-aloud).
2. Computational modeling of human attention and behavior. I build cognitively grounded models that simulate human-like scanpaths during task-driven visual exploration. In the era of generative AI, interfaces can be produced at unprecedented speed, making rapid and human-centered evaluation increasingly important. My goal is to develop simulated users that model how people attend to, make sense of, and act within visual interfaces, helping designers identify usability issues and improve designs before testing with real people.

Publications

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