Valerie Chen

About Me

I'm a final year Machine Learning PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Ameet Talwalkar. I also spend time at OpenHands working with Graham Neubig.

As AI systems become deeply embedded in human work, my research focuses on building AI co-workers that collaborate effectively with people. I work at the intersection of ML, NLP, and HCI where I develop:

• Scalable frameworks that measure collaborative capabilities of AI systems (Copilot Arena, PULSE, Collaborative Effort Scaling).
• LLM simulations to explore design spaces of human–AI collaboration (response biases, user feedback, explanation utility).
• Interaction mechanisms that improve human productivity and decision-making (proactivity, interpretability, personalization).

Impact: My work has been recognized by the Rising Stars in Data Science award, CMU Presidential Fellowship, and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My research has fostered close collaborations with major international companies in engineering and financial sectors, including JetBrains, Feedzai, and BNY Mellon, and have been cited in releases by leading model providers like Mistral, InceptionAI, and Qwen. My research has also received various awards, including Best Paper at a NeurIPS workshop and Oral Presentations at AAAI.

During my PhD, I was a visiting researcher at NYU with He He and intern at Microsoft Research with Q. Vera Liao and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan. I completed my BS in Computer Science at Yale University.

Recent News

• 📢 I'm on the academic job market! Please reach out if I might be a good fit. 📢
• Dec 2025: Our work on Collaborative Effort Scaling won Best Paper at NeurIPS Responsible Foundation Models Workshop! 🏆
• Nov 2025: Gave guest lectures in 3 CMU classes about human-centered design of coding agents. [slides]
• Oct 2025: Selected as a top reviewer of NeurIPS 2025!
• Sep 2025: Co-organized CMU NSF AI-SDM's workshop on Human-AI Complementarity [link]
• Jun 2025: Started my internship at OpenHands 🙌
• May 2025: This summer I'll be presenting accepted work at CHI🇯🇵, FSE🇳🇴, and ICML🇨🇦.

Selected Recent Publications

See the full list of publications here.