Ao is a graduate student in Urban Studies and Computer Science at MIT, working with Professor Jinhua Zhao. His research focuses on creating socially aware AI systems that enhance human daily life, with a particular emphasis on foundation models and computational social science. Ao has published in top-tier AI conferences and journals, including EMNLP, KDD, CIKM, ICLR, ACM TKDD, and ACM TIST.

Before joining M3S, Ao founded two AI startups and served as a technical consultant for multiple companies. At M3S, he focuses on building interactive multimodal agent with applications in education and urban science. He is developing AI assistants that provide teachers with real-time feedback and actionable insights to improve teaching practices. Additionally, he is building an agent system powered by language models to help social scientists and policymakers validate hypotheses, test policy effects, and discover new insights. Ao is committed to leveraging AI to address complex social challenges and improve decision-making processes.