Headshot of Xiaorui Liu

Xiaorui Liu

CS PhD Student at the University of Pennsylvania (advisor: Andrew Head)

A CV IconCVAn Email Iconxrl@seas.upenn.eduA Github IconGithub

Hi! I am a second-year human-computer interaction student. I like thinking about programming. What is the future of ? I especially like to think about these questions with learners and end-users in mind.

My current work focuses on the pedagogy of property-based testing (PBT). One happy result of this is that I get to work closely with Benjamin Pierce and Harrison Goldstein. Right now, we're studying how one might incorporate PBT early in the CS curriculum.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution

Data-Oriented Debugging Across Place and Time

  • Jeffrey Tao, Xiaorui Liu, Ryan Marcus, Andrew Head
  • To appear at UIST 2026

Making Natural Language Programming Harder

  • Vivian Hsinyueh Chan,* Xiaorui Liu,* Sarah E. Chasins
  • PLATEAU 2026

HiLT: A Library for Generating Human-in-the-Loop Data Transformation GUIs

  • Sora Kanosue, Xiaorui Liu, Parker Ziegler, Eric Rawn, Sarah E. Chasins
  • UIST 2025

An earlier version of this work appeared at PLATEAU 2025.

Teaching

UPenn

CIS4120: Human-Computer Interaction

  • Teaching Assistant
    • Spring 2026

UC Berkeley

Data 100: Principles and Techniques of Data Science

  • Teaching Assistant
    • Exam, Staff Support Lead (Summer 2025)
    • Content Lead (Spring 2025)
    • Content Lead (Fall 2024)
    • Pedagogy Lead (Summer 2024)
  • Tutor
    • Spring 2024

Human Contexts and Ethics Content Development

Data 104: Human Contexts and Ethics of Data

  • Reader
    • Fall 2023

CS 70: Discrete Math and Probability Theory

  • Tutor
    • Fall 2023
    • Summer 2023

Lore

I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I studied computer science, data science, and history, with a minor in digital humanities. My data science concentration was in geospatial information and technology, and my history concentration was in the history of science. At Berkeley, I was very fortunate to be advised by Sarah Chasins in PLAIT Lab. I am grateful for all the kind people in PLAIT who inspired me to get into research.

For some fun additional background, I wrote my history thesis on the trajectory of IBM's industrial research labs in the 1990s. Amongst other things, I also wrote a research paper on numerical taxonomy and essentialism in the mid-20th century. I am especially grateful to Ari Edmundson and Jordan Mursinna for helping me be a better (albeit still pretty bad) student of history. I like the humanities :).

While teaching at Berkeley, I was involved in many cool things. In Data 100, I helped create a couple of new assignments and led the creation of its first online exams. I also had the pleasure of working on the Human Contexts and Ethics team (many thanks to the excellent guidance from Ari and Lisa Yan!), where I helped create course content that integrated real data ethics considerations into various data science courses. In my free time, I enjoy cooking, baking, and casually playing video games.