• Research Interests

  • Critical AI
  • Media Aesthetics
  • AI Accountability (Extrapolation)
  • Women Studies
  • Working-Class
  • World Literature

• Recent Research ProjectS

  1. “What Is ‘New?’ Evaluating GenAI Across Disciplines”
     -2024-2025, a workgroup funded by Research Institute for the Humanities
     
     From the project:
     How does a AI model claim novelty in its output? This is a main obstacle for developers of AI and a key question that humanities knows best how to answer. This workgroup evaluate the diversity and novelty measurement of Generative AI.
  
  
  2. Research on AI explanability and accountability, AI Extrapolation
     - 2023-4, funded by CUHK Faculty of Arts Direct Grant
     - 2024-6, funded by Hong Kong Research Grant Council, General Research Fund
     
     From the project:
     "Extrapolation describes how machine learning models can be clueless when encountering unfamiliar samples (i.e., samples outside a "convex hull" of their training sets). Consider a young and well-educated immigrant applying for a car loan. An automated system evaluates the loan request. Extrapolation might happen for an applicant because she is an immigrant, relatively young, and very well-educated – the model has not seen any profile of this kind. The model might not make a sound choice because the information about this applicant is not similar to the samples on which the model has been trained. Having a loan officer look over the model's decision would be reasonable. But in the use of AI systems, this common-sense approach is somehow lost, and so far, there is no requirement for AI models to report when they are clueless. How should we measure, classify, and make transparent the extent of AI cluelessness?"
     –"Clueless AI: Should AI Models Report to Us When They Are Clueless?" Montreal AI Ethics. May 19, 2022.
  
  
  3. "Monograph-in-progress on media improvisations and informational loss in China, Thriving on Deficits: Aesthetics of Inconspicuous Media Improvisations in China. 
     
     From the project:
     "Suppose, in a given historical period, the reader-critic of media was a schooled, but by no means erudite, working person of an ordinary household, not, in other words, trained by any disciplinary methodology. How would her experience differ in interacting with print objects and bits of digital information? …In contrast to the oft-celebrated theories of agency, identity, and connectivity crafted for university classrooms, her concerns—modest, often practical, and sometimes irrational and incoherent—can fetch enormous sympathy from people of lesser social standing. Such concerns have rarely been verified: they are felt but not uttered, or uttered in the circumstances not recorded, or recorded yet deemed irrelevant because of their location outside disciplinary and disciplined research…As a result, this reader-critic moves between the conventional categories such as propaganda, literature, and reporting, unbound to any." 

• Representative Publications

  Journal Articles

  1. “Monolingual Large Language Models (LLMs) in the Age of Multilingual Chatbots,” boundary 2,  volume 52 no. 2. 2025
  2. “Controlled Carefully: How AI Ethics Became Pop in China,” Information, Communication & Society, online first. 2025
  3. “Anchoring Voices: The News Anchor’s Voice in China from Television to AI.” Media, Culture & Society online first 2025
  4. (With Roozbeh Yousefzadeh) "Extrapolation and AI Transparency: Why Machine Learning Models Should Reveal When They Make Decisions Beyond Their Training." Big Data & Society (2023)
  5. "Bullet Screens: texting, streaming, and the spectacle of social inequalities on Chinese social networks." Theory, Culture & Society 38.3 (2021): 29-49.
  6. "The Multi-bodies of The Three-Body Problem." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy. 60.2(2019):183-200.
  7. "Village Worlds: Yan Lianke's Villages and Matters of Life." Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture. 63.2-3(2016): 179-190.
  8. "Mythorealism and Enchanted Time: Yan Lianke's Explosion Chronicles." Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10.1(2016): 103-12.

  Editor-Reviewed Articles for Professional Audiences

  1. “The Jargon Amplifier,” PMLA 139 no.2 (2024). 
  2. "Clueless AI: Should AI Models Report to Us When They Are Clueless?" Montreal AI Ethics. May 19, 2022.
  3. "Book Review: The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China 1861-1906 by Shaoling Ma." Modern Chinese Language and Culture. Oct 12, 2021.
  4. "Rey Chow: Writing Diaspora," in Modern Chinese Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.
  5. "Rey Chow: Modern Chinese Literature and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory" in Modern Chinese Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.
  6. "Book Review: Verses Going Viral: China's New Media Scenes by Heather Inwood." Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews. 37 (2015): 230-233.

• OTHER PROJECTS, ACHIEVEMENTS, AND/OR AWARDS

  1. Yale University, Postdoc at MacMillan Center of International and Area Studies
  2. Duke University, Fellow at Brain Cultures Lab
  3. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award 2023

   

>>  Click here to browse Prof. Cao's personal homepage