Pracha Promthaw

Hi! I’m Pracha (Kim) Promthaw. I’m a researcher at UC San Diego working with Prof. Soohyun Nam Liao, and the Tech & Product Lead at Curico, a nonprofit startup creating hands-on learning activities for children and families in Thailand. I am applying to PhD programs for Fall 2027.

My research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. I study how to build and evaluate AI that strengthens people’s thinking, curiosity, and creativity rather than replacing them. I’m especially interested in:

• Human-AI collaboration: how people and AI should share work, for example instructors and AI giving students feedback together.
• LLM evaluation and alignment with human judgment: building benchmarks and LLM-as-judge methods that reflect what people actually value.
• AI for learning: designing AI learning tools that support, not replace, the interaction between learners, teachers, and parents.

Previously, I received my M.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego, where I worked with Prof. Julian McAuley and Tianyang Liu on LLM evaluation and contributed to CocoaBench (COLM 2026). Before that, I received my B.S. from UMass Amherst, where I was advised by Prof. Hamed Zamani and mentored by Chris Samarinas on MarunaBot, a semifinalist in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2.

Fun fact:

• Outside of research, I enjoy drawing, singing, reading, and cooking (Here is my cooking diary). Right now, I’m studying both Japanese and French. (I’ll be sharing my drawing gallery on this site soon.)
• At UMass Amherst, I performed in the Fringe Festival musical Fly By Night, playing the character Crable, one of my proudest performance on stage!

Extracurricular Club:

• Thai Student Association (Senior Advisor)
• UMass Machine Learning Club (Event Coordinator)
• CS ForEach (Curriculum Team )