Xinru Tang

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. I am advised by Dr. Anne Marie Piper as a member of Accessibility Research Collective. I work and collaborate across interconnected areas essential to human-centered computing, e.g., I spent wonderful time at Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), working on inclusive security and privacy. Outside school, I volunteer with AImpower.org to co-design and develop language and communication technologies with and for people who stutter.

Research Interests

AI models and tools often fall short in real-world scenarios as they tend to be built on assumptions that over-simplify human perception, communication, and activities. My work aims to reveal the flawed assumptions in AI development and push for design and policy that better serve human interests. My current focus is disability, which I position as a vital source of knowledge to make AI safer, more accessible, and crucially, more "human". I developed "Cripping AI" as an overarching framework to bring together and articulate my broader research agenda.

My work spans across the AI development pipeline, including:

• Task Conceptualization, e.g., through analyzing deaf communities' translation work, I reframe machine translation from a language-to-language mapping task to a languaging activity to better account for fluidity in human language use [1].
• Data Representation, e.g., my disability-led annotation work challenges the boundary of "speech" and reveals speakers' lived experiences as a key form of expertise to speech dataset creation [2].
• Design & Evaluation, e.g., my work on visual AI for blind people shows subjectivity inherent in visual descriptions and limitations in design and evaluation frameworks that privilege sighted perspectives [3, 4].
• Deployment & Impact, e.g., my ongoing work examines real-world impacts AI systems bring to disabled people in life-critical domains such as work and employment.

My work has appeared in top-tier venues in human-centered computing and Responsible AI including ACM CHI, CSCW, FAccT, DIS, and IEEE S&P. I have received recognitions including two Honorable Mention Awards from CHI and two Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) recognitions from CSCW.

Selected Publications

Rethinking AI Development Through Lived Disability Experience

Cripping AI: Reimagining AI Through Lived Disability Experiences
Xinru Tang, Ting-an Lin, Jingjin Li and Shaomei Wu
@FAccT2026 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]

Reimagining Sign Language Technologies: Analyzing Translation Work of Chinese Deaf Online Content Creators
Xinru Tang and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]
*Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%)

Everyday Uncertainty: How Blind People Use GenAI Tools for Information Access
Xinru Tang, Ali Abdolrahmani, Darren Gergle and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2025 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]

Developing Disability-Centered AI Practices

Disability-First AI Dataset Annotation: Co-designing Stuttered Speech Annotation Guidelines with People Who Stutter
Xinru Tang, Jingjin Li and Shaomei Wu
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM] [slides]

"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with VLMs
Kapil Garg, Xinru Tang, Jimin Heo, Dwayne R Morgan, Darren Gergle, Erik B Sudderth and Anne Marie Piper
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM]
*Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%)

Critical Perspectives on Accessibility & Inclusive Design

Beyond "Vulnerable Populations'': A Unified Understanding of Vulnerability From A Socio-Ecological Perspective
Xinru Tang, Gabriel Lima, Li Jiang, Lucy Simko and Yixin Zou
@CSCW2025 [PDF] [ACM] [slides] [blog]
*Recognition for Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion

Access in the Shadow of Ableism: An Autoethnography of a Blind Student's Higher Education Experience in China
Weijun Zhang* and Xinru Tang*
@CHI2026 [PDF] [ACM]

Designing for Collective Access: In Search of a Solution to Accessible Communication in a Mixed-Ability Non-Profit
Xinru Tang and Anne Marie Piper
@DIS2026 [PDF] [ACM]