Ngoc Nguyen

• Ph.D., Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, 2019

Dr. Ngoc Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dayton, where she leads the Computation and Decision-Making Lab. Her research lies at the intersection of human-AI interaction, machine learning, and cognitive science, with a focus on developing intelligent systems that support collaborative and data-driven decisions.

Before joining UD, Dr. Nguyen was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dynamic Decision-Making Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, where her research explored AI-driven support for group decision-making through interactive recommendation techniques.

Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF-IIS) and the NSF SBIR/STTR programs for advancing fundamental research and its applications in real-world decision-making contexts.

Dr. Nguyen’s research focuses on understanding how people make decisions under uncertainty and how to design artificial intelligence systems that effectively support and collaborate with humans in individual and group decision-making. Her work combines experimental and computational approaches and draws from the interdisciplinary intersection of cognitive science, social psychology, and computer science to model human behavior, improve machine learning systems, and identify design principles for developing intelligent systems that interact with humans.

• Recommender Systems
• Modeling of Human Choice Behavior
• Artificial Intelligence
• Human-AI Interaction
• Machine Learning

• NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award, 2025 (PI)
• NSF Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I Award, 2025 (Co-PI)
• UD Research Council Seed Grant, 2025 (PI)
• UDRI & College of Arts and Sciences Fellowship, 2024 (PI)
• UD Research Council Seed Grant, 2024 (PI)

Workshop co-organizer: AAAI 2021 Fall Symposium on Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Machine Teams; ENTER 2017 e-Tourism Workshop on Decision Making in Tourism, Rome, Italy

Program committee: ACM Conference on Recommender Systems; ACM Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization; ACM The Web Conference

Journal reviewer: ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST); ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS); Journal of Intelligent Information Systems; User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction; Personal and Ubiquitous Computing; Frontiers in Computer Science; Topics in Cognitive Science

A full list of publications is available online.

Phan, D. N., Hytla, P., Rice, A., & Nguyen, T. N. (2025). Federated learning with randomized alternating direction method of multipliers and application in training neural networks. Neural Networks, 107501.

Nguyen, T. N., McDonald, C., & Gonzalez, C. (2025). Credit assignment: challenges and opportunities in developing human-like learning agents. Bi-directionality in Human-AI Collaborative Systems, 407-449.

Nguyen, T. N., Jamale, K., & Gonzalez, C. (2024). Predicting and Understanding Human Action Decisions: Insights from Large Language Models and Cognitive Instance-Based Learning. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (Vol. 12, pp. 126-136).

Nguyen, T. N., Phan, D. N., & Gonzalez, C. (2023). Learning in Cooperative Multiagent Systems Using Cognitive and Machine Models. ACM Transactions on Autonomous & Adaptive Systems, 1-22.

Nguyen, T.N., Gonzalez, C (2023). Minimap: An interactive dynamic decision making game for search and rescue missions. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02149-7

Nguyen, T. N., Phan, D. N., & Gonzalez, C. (2022). SpeedyIBL: A comprehensive, precise, and fast implementation of instance-based learning theory. Behavior Research Methods, 1-24

Zhao, M., Eadeh, F., Nguyen, T. N., Gupta, P., Gonzalez, C., Admoni, H., and Woolley, A. W. (2022). Teaching Agents to Understand Teamwork: Evaluating and Predicting Collective Intelligence as a Latent Variable via Hidden Markov Model. Computers in Human Behavior, 139, 107524

Nguyen, T. N., & Gonzalez, C. (2021). Theory of Mind from Observation in Cognitive Models and Humans. Topics in Cognitive Science

Nguyen, T. N., & Gonzalez, C. (2020). Cognitive Machine Theory of Mind. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020). 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020), July 29-Aug. 1, Virtual meeting. (pp. 2560-2566)

Nguyen, T. N., Ricci, F., Delic, A., & Bridge, D. (2019). Conflict resolution in group decision making: insights from a simulation study. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 29(5), 895-941

Nguyen, T. N., & Ricci, F. (2018). A chat-based group recommender system for tourism. Information Technology & Tourism, 18(1-4), 5-28

Nguyen, T. N., & Ricci, F. (2018). Situation-dependent combination of long-term and session-based preferences in group recommendations: an experimental analysis. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1366-1373)

Nguyen, T. N., & Ricci, F. (2017). Dynamic elicitation of user preferences in a chat-based group recommender system. In Proceedings of the 32nd Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1685-1692)

Nguyen, T. N., & Ricci, F. (2017). Combining long-term and discussion-generated preferences in group recommendations. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2017) (pp. 377-378)

Delic, A., Neidhardt, J., Nguyen, T. N., Ricci, F., Rook, L., Werthner, H., & Zanker, M. (2016). Observing group decision making processes. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems (pp. 147-150)