Yutong Ren
Yutong is a first-year Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on AI-driven XR systems that understand and adapt to human behavior. He studies how immersive systems can use signals such as eye tracking, interaction data, audio features, and environmental context to infer users’ cognitive and affective states in real time. His work is grounded in three questions:
(1) How can XR systems model user states such as boredom, attention, distraction, and engagement from multimodal data?
(2) How can AI reason about these states in relation to task and environmental context?
(3) How can XR systems respond with adaptive interventions that improve human performance, engagement, and safety while preserving user agency?
