ResearchProject | Wei Lai

Figure 3. Visual overview of the entire pedagogical agent (PA) gestures design procedures.

[Research Project] Grounding Pedagogical Intents in Embodied AI Teachers: A Human-Centered Framework for Designing and Evaluating Instructional Gestures

Human-centered framework for designing and evaluating instructional gestures in embodied AI teachers. Published in IJHCI 2026.

Multimodal instructional gesture corpus

[Research Project] Multimodal Instructional Gesture Corpus (PolyU × SCNU)

A multimodal corpus of dialogue, gesture, gaze, and fNIRS, in progress with South China Normal University.

Visual realism, perceived humanness, and LLM-generated feedback

[Research Project] Delivering Personalized LLM-Generated Feedback Through Embodied Pedagogical Agents: The Roles of Visual Realism and Perceived Humanness

Under review at Computers & Education.

Word-gesture alignment

[Research Project] Word–Gesture Alignment for Generative Embodied AI Tutors
^[draft]

Alignment between teachers' gestures and spoken words, toward generative embodied AI tutor design.

[Research Project] Developing cue-behavior association for habit formation: A qualitative study to explore the role of avatar in hypertension

Qualitative study of avatar appearance as a visual cue for habit formation in hypertension self-management. Digital Health, 2024.

[Research Project] Motion tracking of daily living and physical activities in healthcare: A systematic review from designers' perspective

[Research Project] When Gestures and Words Synchronize: Exploring A Human Lecturer’s Multimodal Interaction for the Design of Embodied Pedagogical Agents

[Research Project] How Students Perceive Lecturers' Gestures? An Exploration In Gesture-meaning Matching Toward Embodied Pedagogical Agent Design

Heatmaps of lecturers’ and students’ bodied movements in offline, online, and hybrid lecture settings

[Research Project] Who Shapes the Network of a Pedagogical Space? Clues from the Movements in the Physical Places

MoMM 2022. How lecturers’ and students’ movements, with seating and equipment, shape a pedagogical network in physical space.

[Research Project] Interface, Pedagogical Agents and Chatbox in Virtual Learning Environments: An Eye Tracking Experiment