I am Wei Lai, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Language Science and Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I study embodied AI teachers, instructional gesture, and multimodal interaction: how speech, gesture, and gaze work together in teaching, and how that can be built into embodied pedagogical agents.
My PhD at PolyU Design combined empirical work on word–gesture alignment, learning performance, and student perception (including eye tracking) with lecture prototypes of embodied AI teachers that were evaluated with students. I both research these systems and implement them—from gesture analysis to agent design and animation.
Recent work
- IJHCI 2026: instructional gesture framework for embodied AI teachers
- Computers & Education (under review): LLM-generated feedback through embodied pedagogical agents; visual realism and perceived humanness
- Multimodal corpus (dialogue, gesture, gaze, social-interaction cues, and fNIRS; in progress)
