About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the Kyoto Institute of Technology where I work with Professor Shibuya Yu（澁谷　雄）to co-direct the Human Interface research lab.

While the world has never lacked researchers who focus on “love,” “affection,” “attachment,” and “social bonding,” my research journey began with exploring why “separation” or “disruption of social relationships” gives rise to pain, and how individuals navigate their lives following such a profound loss. As a former research fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine (Center for Research on End of Life Care), I have extensive experience conducting research on grief, one of the most profound emotional experiences human beings endure after the loss/death of a loved one.

I then expanded my research to encompass resilience, peer support, and the dynamics that foster attachment formation. Most of my projects involve AI agents, explainable AI (XAI), extended reality (XR) avatars, and large language models (LLMs); however, I firmly believe that technology should be defined by its purpose and the problems it solves for human beings, rather than by its underlying technical mechanisms.

Below you can find some selected publications that indicate the topics I am interested in:

1. Xygkou, A., Siriaraya, P., Covaci, A., Prigerson, H.G., Neimeyer, R., Ang, C.S. and She, W.J., 2023, April. The” Conversation” about Loss: Understanding How Chatbot Technology was Used in Supporting People in Grief. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15).
2. She, Wan-Jou, Kota Dangisho, Panote Siriaraya, Felix Dollack, and Shinsuke Nakajima. “Matchmaking for Mental Well-being: Development of a Peer-based Support System (Peer2S) for Students during COVID Lockdown.” In Companion Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 119-122. 2023. (Best Poster Paper Award IUI 2023)
3. She, Wan Jou, Lis Pereira, Fei Cheng, Sakiko Yahata, Panote Siriaraya, and Eiji Aramaki. “EmplifAI: a Fine-grained Dataset for Japanese Empathetic Medical Dialogues in 28 Emotion Labels.” In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1116-1131. 2025.
4. She, Wan Jou, Panote Siriaraya, Hibiki Iwakoshi, Noriaki Kuwahara, and Keitaro Senoo. “An explainable AI application (AF’fective) to support monitoring of patients with atrial fibrillation after catheter ablation: Qualitative focus group, Design Session, and Interview Study.” JMIR human factors 12, no. 1 (2025): e65923.
5. Yuta, Yamada, Panote Siriaraya, Christophe Claramunt, Shoko Wakamiya, Teriitutea Quesnot, Eiji Aramaki, Attila Kertesz, Ismail Rakip Karas, Jonas KH Fischer, and Wan Jou She. “How Many Kilometers Can I Drive Before Shisa-chan Gets Sick? Affective LLM-AR Gamification for Mobility Behavior Change in Okinawa.” In Companion Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 70-74. 2026.