Zhuoran (Elara) Liu

Hi! I’m Elara Liu, a second-year MSCS student at Northwestern University advised by Karan Ahuja. I work at the intersection of Human–AI Interaction, agentic LLM systems & tool use, and wearable sensing for health.

I like to build end-to-end systems—from interfaces and retrieval/LLM backends to instrumentation, logging, and analysis—and then evaluate how reliably and safely they support people. Recent themes in my work include constraint-aligned agents that respect hardware/operational limits, IR-driven sensemaking for comparing concepts across contexts, and cross-dataset benchmarks for IMU-based activity recognition.

Methodologically, I span prototyping, study design/piloting, dataset curation, and evaluation (task metrics and human ratings). On the engineering side, I work in Python/TypeScript, React/Next.js, Hono/Bun/FastAPI, and pragmatic LLM evaluation. I care about accessibility (WCAG/ARIA) and reproducibility in open source. I also enjoy teaching and community building (e.g., teaching assistant; previously led a 130-member volunteer subtitling group -- BelugaSubs).

I’m applying to PhD programs (Fall 2026) in groups that blend HCI, system building, and health. If our interests align, I’d love to contact with you via the second email button on the right below.