I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), and a faculty member of Data Intelligence And Learning (DIAL) Lab. My research interests lie in:
- Information Retrieval (Recommender Systems, Search)
- Agentic AI (Search Agents, Tool/Skill-using Agents)
- Trustworthy AI (Model Calibration, Uncertainty Quantification)
- Natural Language Processing (Text Mining, Information Extraction)
I am actively seeking for passionate graduate (Ph.D., MS) students, and undergraduate interns. If you are interested, please send me an email with your interests, CV, and transcript.
Experience
- Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), South Korea
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, 2026.09 - Present - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), United States
Postdoctoral Researcher, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, 2025.04 - 2026.08
Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Han - Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), South Korea
Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, 2024.03 - 2025.03
PIURI Postdoctoral Fellowship
Advisor: Prof. Hwanjo Yu
Education
- Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), South Korea
Ph.D., Convergence IT Engineering, 2019.03 - 2024.02
Advisor: Prof. Hwanjo Yu - Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), South Korea
B.S., Industrial and Management Engineering, 2015.03 - 2019.02
Ranked 1st in the Department - GyeongNam Science High School, South Korea
Early Graduation, 2013.03 - 2015.02
Academic Service
[Program Committee / Reviewer]
- KDD (ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining), 2023 - 2027
- AAAI (Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence), 2023 - 2027
- WWW (ACM The Web Conference), 2024 - 2026
- ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning), 2024 - 2026
- ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations), 2024 - 2026
- ARR (Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Rolling Review), 2025 - 2026
- Expert Systems with Applications (SCIE, Q1), 2025
- Journal of Computational Chemistry (SCIE, Q1), 2025
- Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (SCIE, Q1), 2026
- Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (SCIE, Q1), 2026
Honors & Awards
- POSTECH PIURI Postdoctoral Fellowship (100,000 USD), 2025
- Fourth Prize, The 3rd POSTECH Research Award, 2023
- AAAI Student Scholarship, 2022
- Third Prize, Kakao Music Playlist Recommendation Competition, 2020
- Kwanjeong Educational Foundation Scholarship (15,000 USD), 2017 – 2019
- Woori Bank Exchange Student Scholarship for TU Munich in Germany (4,000 USD), 2018
- POSTECH Exchange Student Scholarship for TU Munich in Germany (2,000 USD), 2018
- POSTECH Admission Scholarship, 2015
- Hanseong Sonjaehan Foundation Scholarship (4,000 USD), 2014
Talks & Presentations
Structure Shapes the Future of DataxLLM Systems: Retrieval, Structuring, and Reasoning
- Korea University (Seoul, South Korea), IDEA × DAIS Joint Workshop, 2026.8Information Retrieval in the Era of Large Language Models
- UNIST (Virtual), AIGS seminar, 2025.10Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Concept Coverage-based Query Set Generation
- WSDM (Hannover), oral presentation (link), 2025.03Doubly Calibrated Estimator for Recommendation on Data Missing Not At Random
- WWW (Singapore), oral presentation (link), 2024.05Obtaining Calibrated Probabilities with Personalized Ranking Models
- AAAI (Virtual, Vancouver), oral presentation (link), 2022.02
- UberAI (Virtual, San Francisco), invited by Joseph Wang, 2022.05
- Naver-POSTECH AI Day (Pohang, South Korea), 2022.06Bidirectional Distillation for Top-K Recommender System
- WWW (Virtual, Ljubljana), oral presentation (link), 2021.04Deep Rating Elicitation for New Users in Collaborative Filtering
- WWW (Virtual, Taipei), oral presentation, 2020.04
Patents
- Method and Apparatus of Knowledge Distillation from Heterogeneous Models for Reducing Prediction Time of Recommender Systems, South Korea, 2023
- Consensus Learning from Heterogeneous Objectives for One-Class Collaborative Filtering, South Korea, 2022
Teaching
- Introduction to Recommender Systems (ESW4024_41), 2026 Fall