Publications
From Tokens to Concepts: Exploring Synonym-Based Training
View Preprint → NEW (Jan) 🚩: Accepted to EACL 2026HEART: Measuring Human-likeness, Empathy, Attunement, Responsiveness, and Task-following in LLM Conversations
View Abstract →Crafting Emotional TTS Conversation Responses Based on User Preferences
View PDF →A Relaxation App (HeartBot) for Stress and Emotional Well-Being Over a 21-Day Challenge
View Paper →Impact of the Heartfulness program on loneliness in high schoolers
View Paper →Experience
Hippocratic.AI
Applied Scientist
Co-led HEART benchmark for socially-aware agents. Designed psychologist-informed rubric, built pairwise LLM+human evaluation with Elo scoring.
Amazon
SDE Intern, Alexa Experiences
Voice User Interface through Remarkable Alexa Skills. Multi-Room Music Device Connectivity for Multi-Modal through full-stack development.
CURIS: Stanford Research
Summer Research Fellow
Pre-trained LLAMA-3 to grasp meaning at concept level. Finetuned Concept-Aware LLMs on tasks requiring conceptual thinking.
Unify Technologies
Rufous AI Interviewer
Architected Rufous AI, an internal screening interviewer. Finetuned Mistral-3.2 on Interview Conversation Tuples.
Code for Nonprofit Inc.
Co-Founder, Lead Developer
Developed HeartBot stress management app and HFNMeditate for a $40k grant-funded study on meditation effects.
Education
Stanford University
M.S. in Computer Science, AI Focus
Stanford University
B.S. in Computer Science, Systems Focus
Contact
Interested in collaborating on empathetic AI research, or just want to say hello? I'd love to hear from you.
laya [at] stanford.edu