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.

I develop AI co-workers that collaborate effectively with humans. My recent focus is on software engineering, in collaboration with LMArena, JetBrains, and OpenHands, and new work in mathematical and medical applications. In my research, I'm excited about:

• Developing algorithmic frameworks that integrate state-of-the-art models and interactive agents into real-world collaborative settings [1, 2, 3].
• Partnering with industry organizations to study how these systems shape work practices and decision-making at scale [4, 5, 6].
• Contributing behavioral insights into human–AI interactions to inform the design of next-generation AI co-workers [7, 8, 9].

My work has been recognized by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, CMU Presidential Fellowship, and Rising Stars in Data Science.

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. 📢
• 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.