Welcome to the Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) lab. The ACTION lab is led by Dr. Jessie Chin, of the School of Information Sciences and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Currently, there are four main research themes in the ACTION Lab:
- Understanding human cognition interacting with digital environments and artificial intelligence (AI)
- Developing and examining coupling cognitive agents to support individual and group behavior
- Understanding and designing understandable and actionable information for All
- Developing and implementing innovative and accessible digital health technologies and interventions for All
As an interdisciplinary team, our research aims at advancing understanding of human cognition interacting with evolving technologies, and further translating theories in cognitive sciences and human-computer interaction as well as approaches in computational modeling (e.g., statistical models, cognitive modeling, machine learning) and language models (e.g., natural language processing, large language models) to build sociotechnical solutions for augmenting complex human and group behavior for all (including learning, health behavior, group decision-making and ideation creation, etc.). [Learn More]
Keywords from Current Research Projects: Applied Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Cognitive Agents, Intelligent Agents, Conversational Agents, Information Foraging, Self-Regulated Learning, Decision-Making, Cognitive Aging, Health Communication, Health Literacy, Digital Health, Precision Self-Management, Large Language Models
NEWS FROM THE ACTION LAB
June 5. Congrats to the undergraduate researcher, Sarah Wheeler, for receiving the Outstanding Poster Presentation at the 2026 Undergraduate Research Symposium!
June 5. Congrats to Mengke Wu and Kexin Quan for the acceptance of the full paper, “What Makes an AI Writing Companion a Good Fit? A Personality-Informed Co-Design Study” to Creativity & Cognition 2026.
April 20. Congrats to the undergraduate researcher, Adarsh Krishnan, on receiving the Research Support Grant for his project, “Multi-Agent Belief Update and Action Planning” (with the doctoral candidate Tre Tomaszewski as co-supervisor).
April 20. Congrats to Mengke Wu and Kexin Quan for the conditional acceptance of the full paper, “What Makes an AI Writing Companion a Good Fit? A Personality-Informed Co-Design Study” to Creativity & Cognition 2026.
April 13 – 17. Our doctoral student, Kexin Quan, will be presenting her first-authored article, “Towards AI as Colleagues: Multi-Agent System Improves Structured Ideation Processes” in CHI’26 at Barcelona, Spain. Our Action Lab alumni, Wen-Ning Chen and Smit Desai (Northeastern) will also present a poster, “Non-Linear Journeys with Voice Assistants: A Multi-Trajectory Analysis of Older Adults’ Long-Term Home Use” in CHI’26.
Feb 18. Jessie presented “Responding to Hesitancy: A Theory-Driven LLM Agent to Support Dietary Intentions in Ambivalent Individuals” in AI for Health and Nutrition Lecture Series.
July 25. Jessie received the NSF CAREER Award for a 5-year project, “Search as a Mechanism for Learning”.
Primary Funding Agencies for the ACTION LAB
Our research has been supported by:
- National Science Foundation 2025 – Present
- National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute, National Library of Medicine) 2020 – Present
- National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research 2024 – Present
- National Multiple Sclerosis Society 2025 – Present
- Campus Research Board 2022 – Present
- Institute of Museum and Library Services 2023 -2025
- Jump ARCHES 2021 – 2025
Last Update: Feb 22, 2026.