Ran Ji (Sara)
Hi! I'm a Psychology student at UC San Diego. I previously studied Psychology and Cognitive Science at UC Davis. I'm interested in child development, early autism detection, inclusive education, and AI cognition—metacognition and perspective-taking in vision–language models.
I work with the VBVR Team, Grow AI, and previously the ASPIRE Program at the MIND Institute; I also do research at Thriving Asians on Asian mental health. I care about how children and AI both learn to understand the world—and how we can support them better.
Research Interests
- Metacognition and egocentric bias in vision–language models
- Video reasoning and benchmark design for AI
- Infant gesture, vocabulary, and early ASD screening
- Asian mental health and help-seeking
- Social-emotional learning and inclusive education
Projects
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VBVR: A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite
Co-designed reasoning tasks and a 200-task data generator; contributed to benchmark design and model evaluation; built the project website.
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Grow AI: Metacognition & Egocentric Bias in VLMs
Two-stage protocol (perceptual judgment + confidence) for visual tasks; evaluated 103 VLMs on perspective-taking with custom images.
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ASPIRE: What Parents Notice — Gesture & Vocabulary
Behavioral coding of infant social-communicative behaviors (ECI scale), MIND Institute with Prof. Meagan Talbott; independent project on parental concerns and communicative outcomes.
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Stepping Stones SEL
Designed and delivered a 6-week social-emotional learning curriculum for grades 1–2 in Shanghai; role-playing, emotional drawing, and support for inclusive participation.
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AGI as Second Being: The Structural-Generative Ontology of Intelligence
Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji (2025).arXiv:2509.02089 [cs.AI]