POLY Z.H. SUNPersonal Informatics

Associate Professor · ECNU
Director · PIS Lab

POLY Z.H.SUN

Intelligence, designed around the person.

Enter the research ↓
Shanghai ECNU faculty page ↗
Profile

Researching intelligence from the perspective of the person.

I study how people perceive, understand, and act with intelligent systems—and how interaction can make those systems more useful to each individual.

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science at East China Normal University and Director of the Personal Informatics System Lab. I received my Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

A red cable car travelling above water beside a mountain

Beyond the lab

I play, collect, travel, and talk ideas through.

Research occupies most of my week, but not all of it. I make time for turn-based strategy, character-collecting games, open-ended exploration, platform and party games, and collectible card games. I also make podcasts and host live streams—places where ideas become conversations in real time.

Travel and time near the sea help me slow down and notice things again. They return to the work in how I think about play, feedback, participation, curiosity, and the many ways people make a system their own.

Research

From human state
to human capability.

My work connects sensing, behavioral evidence, computational models, and interaction design. The objective is not intelligence in isolation, but intelligence that helps a particular person understand, act, and flourish.

R1

Human state
& cognition

Measure perception, attention, affect, cognitive load, and physiological signals in real tasks.

R2

Interaction
methodology

Build tangible, multimodal, and adaptive interactions that make system intent perceivable and negotiable.

R3

Embodied
& physical AI

Understand physical and embodied intelligence from the human side: trust, coordination, legibility, and shared control.

Research loop

  1. Prototype
  2. Observe
  3. Model
  4. Personalize

Selected work

Publications

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    Collaboration

    Work on intelligence
    that works for people.

    I welcome postdoctoral fellows, MPhil and PhD students, undergraduate researchers, academic collaborators, and industry partners interested in Tangible Informatics, Vision–Language–Action models, human-centered AI, and embodied interaction.

    poly.zhsun@outlook.com ↗
    PIS Lab ↗ ECNU faculty page ↗