Hello!
I am Botao ‘Amber’ Hu—call me Amber (him/he).
I'm a PhD candidate in Human Centred Computing at University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science, supervised by Prof. Max Van Kleek. I’m a social computing researcher and experiential futures designer. My research orbits around Mortality. I was also a cohort researcher in Summer of Protocols and ERA Fellowship.
GScholar: Botao 'Amber' Hu LinkedIn: Botao 'Amber' Hu Bluesky: @botao.hu GitHub: botaohu X: @bah_eth
If you're interested in learning more or discussing potential collaborations, please don't hesitate to interact with me.
Research Statement
Research Interests:
Cyborg Sociology
- Pillar 1: Society After Autonomy
- Pillar 2: Reality Across Umwelten
- Pillar 3: Life for Flourishing
Legend: Full Paper (Year of Publication) — Design Work (Year of Design)
News:
- [Mar 2026] One paper, which summarizes all my more-than-human design works, was accepted as a DRS 2026 paper, and I gave a talk at Immersive Acts at the Royal College of Art (RCA).
- [Feb 2026] I started my Existential Risk Alliance (ERA) Fellowship in Cambridge since Feb 2026! Welcome to hang out and work on my insured agents.
- [Jan 2026] Two papers accepted at CHI 2026—see you in Barcelona!
- Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures
- Nudging the Somas: Exploring How Live-Configurable Mixed Reality Objects Shape Open-Ended Intercorporeal Movements
- [Jan 2026] Two workshop papers presented at AAAI 2026 in Singapore!
- On Improvisation and Open-Endedness: Insights for Experiential AI
- Some[Body] Must Receive That Pain: A Position on Agentic Accountability
Services:
- Reviewer for CHI 2026, SIGGRAPH 2026/2025, SIGGRAPH Asia 2026/2025, DIS 2026, IMX 2025, FDG 2026, NIME 2025, ALIFE 2026/2025, Interacting with Computers
- Jury for MIT Reality Hack 2025
Is Decentralized AI Governable? A Paradigm Shift from Policy to Protocol
Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations, Benefits, and Governance Dilemmas in Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents
Spore in the Wild: A Case Study of Spore.fun as an Open-Environment Evolution Experiment with Sovereign AI Agents on TEE-Secured Blockchains
From UX to TX: Trust Experience Design for Distributed Autonomous Intelligence in the Wild
Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures
Understanding Protocols Design for Digital Commons: Objectives, Challenges, Lifecycles, and Strategies
Protocol as Poetry: A Case Study on Pak's Protocol Art
Autonomous Realities: A Journey into Protocolizing Digital Object Permanence in a Future of Many Mixed Realities
Speculating on Blockchain as an Unstoppable 'Nature' Towards the Emergence of Artificial Life
2025
What if you could feel your surroundings without seeing them?
Exhibitions:
Live-coding Bodies
2024
How Mixed Reality Objects Shape Intercorporeal Movements?
Exhibitions:
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Multiplayer Omnipresent Fighting Arena
2023
Can Muggles Understand What It's Like to Be a Wizard?
Exhibitions:
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2024
What if our language contained characters that specifically conveyed our awareness of body language?
Exhibitions:
Body Oracle: Exploring Somatic Hieroglyphs for Collective Bodily Awareness
Merging Cyberdelic Mixed Realities
2024
What if our realities became entangled with others' like fungi's interdependence?
Exhibitions:
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2024
Would you choose 80 years of natural life or perhaps 100+ years of an artificialized life mechanized by protocols?
Exhibitions:
Cybroc: Cyborgizing Broccoli for Longevity
2024
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Exhibitions:
Becoming Bat with EchoVision: Experiencing More-than-human Perception through Mixed Reality
2025
How Does a Collective Mind Emerge from Distributed Tentacles that Move Together?
Exhibitions:
2024
What if you could see others’ heartbeats while dancing with them?
Exhibition:
Cell Space: Augmented Awareness of Intercorporeality
2024
If an immortal AI life could live forever in cyberspace, how would it find meaning or purpose?
Exhibitions:
Composable Life: Speculation for Decentralized AI Life
2019, 2025
How might an AI Life perceive our city?
Exhibitions:
City of Sparkles: Embodying Cityscape of Human Memories
Open-Source Mixed Reality Headset
2023
Why spend $3,500 on a HoloLens?
Exhibitions:
2024
How does AI think about Human-AI symbiosis?
Exhibition:
EverForest: A More-Than-AI Sustainability Manifesto from an On-Chain Artificial Life
Delft, Netherlands
Royal College of Art, London, UK
Immersive Acts symposium
Boston, USA
MIT Media Lab, TeleAbsence course
Cambridge, UK
Cambridge ERA:AI Fellowships
![Some[Body] Must Receive That Pain](https://images.spr.so/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/j42No7y-dcokJuNgXeA0ig/3327232f-995a-4980-89ed-3dbdc0a639b4/image/w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
Singapore
AAAI 2026
Hong Kong
SIGGRAPH Asia 2025
Bergen, Norway
CSCW 2025
Reykjavik, Iceland
IERR 2025
Espoo, Finland
Aalto University
Life, minds, and evolution are essentially computational processes.
