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About

Zijian Jiang is a leading researcher at the intersection of social robotics, artificial intelligence, and assistive technology for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) intervention. Their work focuses on developing intelligent, interactive systems—particularly socially assistive robots—to improve social communication, emotional cognition, and attention skills in children with ASD. Jiang’s most cited paper, “FECTS: A Facial Emotion Cognition and Training System for Chinese Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder” (2022, 28 citations), introduces a novel training system that integrates facial emotion recognition with interactive technology, addressing a critical gap in culturally adapted autism interventions. Another influential study, “Attention shifting during child–robot interaction” (2019, 10 citations), provides preliminary clinical evidence that robots can effectively guide attention shifting in children with ASD, a foundational skill for social learning. Jiang also pioneered the use of image captioning in Chinese for rehabilitation robots (2020, 8 citations) and developed an attention-based interactive system for gaze-following (2021). Their recent work on computational models of emotion for socially interactive robots (2023) further advances the field by enabling robots to adapt emotionally during therapy. Through these contributions, Jiang is shaping the future of human-robot interaction for special needs education.