Industry Bio | Academic Bio
I hold a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with years of experience in designing, developing, deploying, and evaluating ML- and LLM-infused full-stack interactive systems for human-AI co-creativity. My expertise spans:
- • Data collection and analysis pipelines, including bespoke crowdsourcing systems, NLP techniques, quantiative and qualitative analysis techniques
- • Development and deployment of ML models and front-end interactive systems
- • Scientific evaluation methods through controlled lab and field studies
- • Collaboration with professionals from various disciplines (e.g., engineers, designers, scientists, and teachers) across organizations (e.g., Toyota Research Institute, Conservation X Labs, Allen Institute for AI, MIT)
Hyeonsu Kang is a CS Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Niki Kittur and affiliated with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
His research in human-computer interaction and natural language processing is on reimagining interaction paradigms by creating novel systems for synthesis and ideation, enhancing cognitive creativity and efficiency with AI.
He focuses on designing and implementing innovative interactive systems in the real-world and computational methods for empowering people to think outside-the-box when approaching a challenge
[TOCHI'22,
CHI'22,
NAACL'22,
NeurIPS'23, AAAI'24], helping them effectively discover relevant prior knowledge and synthesize insights from it
[UIST'23,
CHI'23,
UIST'22,
CHI'22,
CHI'24], and facilitating social learning and idea development through augmented feedback and expertise exchange with peers and domain experts
[CHI'18,
UIST'17,
Collective Intelligence'19, CHI'24 🏆].
In his work, he draws from cognitive theories to examine how people use higher-order cognition to transfer ideas from one domain to another.
He also develops new interaction and natural language processing techniques to computationally augment the process of analogical transfer and insights generation.
His research endeavors have fostered collaborations with academic institutions like MIT, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, and KAIST, and industry partners such as Conservation X (a conservation-focused non-profit), the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Toyota Research Institute.
He has published papers in premier NLP and HCI conferences and journals such as ACM CHI, UIST, TOCHI, AAAI, NAACL, and NeurIPS, including a best paper award at CHI 2024.
His work has been applied in pragmatic scenarios, like the allocation of nearly ~2M in prize money for conservation innovation contests, in collaboration with Conservation X, and at Semantic Scholar.
As part of his research dissemination, he has presented at several conferences and delivered guest lectures at the Allen Institute for AI.
Hyeonsu's work garnered him recognition as a Google Cloud Research Innovator (2021).
His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Office of Naval Research, Toyota Research Institute, and Google Cloud.
He was previously supported by the South Korean National Scholarship for Science and Engineering.
He received his BS in Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University.
He also worked and interned at MIT, the Allen Institute for AI, UC San Diego, and Tableau Software.
Publications
A demo video of Synergi is available here.
A demo video of ComLittee is available here.