I'm an Assistant Professor at KAIST AI leading the Computation & Cognition (COCO) Lab. I will also serve as the head of the NVIDIA-KAIST Joint AI Research Lab. If you are interested in joining my lab, please visit this page.

My research aims to build machines that can reason, learn, and interact more effectively, with inspiration from human cognition and development. I pursue this goal through two complementary directions: machine social cognition and social world modeling. In machine social cognition, I study how machines can improve their reasoning and learning through additional computation and data from other models or from themselves, such as distillation and data synthesis. In social world modeling, I study how machines can understand or predict mental states, social context, and norms, with applications to human behavior simulation and physical AI.

Before joining KAIST, I spent a gap year as a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Yejin Choi and Jan Kautz at NVIDIA. I was a Young Investigator and an intern at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), and received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Seoul National University, advised by Gunhee Kim.