Research

Research & Publications

My research practice explores the relationship between technology, human interpretation, and creative systems. Through academic research, professional experimentation, and interactive media projects, I investigate how emerging technologies reshape the ways we create, understand, and experience narratives.

Publications

  • Zhuang, Y. (2022)
    Causes of Juvenile Shoplifting: Perspectives from Behavioral Economics and Psychology
    Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Mental Health, Education and Human Development (MHEHD 2022), Atlantis Press, pp. 676–681.
    Sole author.
    This research examined juvenile shoplifting behavior through interdisciplinary perspectives, combining behavioral economics and psychology to explore how individual decision-making is influenced by cognitive, social, and environmental factors.
  • Perone, A. K., Zhou, L., Hernandez, E., Verma, S., Zhuang, Y., & Yeh, T. (2026)
    A Scoping Review of LGBTQ+ Multigenerational Programming and Interventions: Gaps and Opportunities
    Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, 1–34.
    Co-author.
    This research reviewed existing approaches to LGBTQ+ multigenerational programming, identifying gaps and opportunities for future community-based interventions.

Practice-Based Research

Independent practice-based research exploring how generative systems can participate in interactive storytelling and world creation.

I developed a series of AI-driven interactive narrative experiments in which worlds are generated dynamically in response to participant input rather than following traditional pre-authored branching structures.

The work investigates the relationship between human intention and machine contribution by exploring:
- How users perceive ownership over worlds they partially create
- How generated narratives influence feelings of agency and authorship
- How persistent memory and system states shape evolving experiences

Current development focuses on an open-world narrative system integrating persistent memory and image generation, where participant interactions continuously influence the evolution of the generated environment.

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