Taleh Malikov
MS Student, University of Chicago
Taleh Malikov | HCI MS student
Taleh Malikov is a Computer Science M.S. student at University of Chicago. He is a student researcher in the Human Computer Integration Lab, directed by Professor Pedro Lopes.
His work focuses on Human-Computer Interaction. He builds interfaces for systems that act through the body rather than alongside it — currently on making an embodied AI model’s motor intent visible and inspectable without requiring a participant wired to stimulation hardware.
Before UChicago, Taleh spent three years building production distributed systems, including a national health insurance platform serving 200+ hospitals and over 10 million citizens.
Research
An avatar interface for embodied AI motor commands
Taleh Malikov, Romain Nith, Pedro Lopes. Human Computer Integration Lab, University of Chicago, 2026
Studying systems that communicate through the body normally requires a participant wired to electrical muscle stimulation hardware before anyone can see what the model is doing. I built a 3D avatar that removes that dependency: it translates the model’s output into skeletal joint commands and renders the motion in a browser. Each command is checked against the anatomical range of the joint it targets, and the interface shows the requested value beside the applied one, so a motion the body could not perform reads as a visible constraint rather than an impossible pose. It runs as the lab’s public interface for this work, with a manual control mode and a debug mode for stepping through a sequence command by command.
Teaching
Teaching Assistant, Cloud Computing (Graduate)
University of Chicago, Fall 2026
Instructor, Introductory Python Labs
The Academy of Public Administration, 2021–2023
Experience
Software Engineer
The State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance, 2023–2025
Built three clinical microservices (registration, laboratory, radiology) for a HIMSS-certified national hospital system serving 200+ hospitals and over 10 million citizens. Owned two systems end to end, including a military conscript records pipeline integrating three government organizations through an inter-agency gateway with electronic signing.
Information Technology Specialist
The Academy of Public Administration, 2023
Proposed and led the Academy’s first electronic library — directed a five-person team, built the application and full API layer, and deployed it on Academy infrastructure. Still in active use.
Education
M.S. Computer Science, University of Chicago, 2025–2027. Specialization in Artificial Intelligence.
B.S. Computer Science, The Academy of Public Administration, 2024. 96.96/100, graduated with honors.