[📣 2026 March Update] I will be joining KAIST AI as an Assistant Professor starting in 2026 fall, where I will lead the Computation & Cognition (COCO) Lab. If you are interested in joining my lab, please visit this page.

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

My research aims to build machines that can reason, learn, and interact more effectively, with inspiration from human development and cognition. I pursue this goal through two complementary directions: social world modeling and machine social cognition. In social world modeling, I study how machines can understand people's mental states, social context, norms, and embodied interaction, with applications to human behavior simulation and physical AI. In machine social cognition, I study how machines can improve their reasoning and learning by using computation, data, and feedback from others or themselves, including inference-time computation, synthetic data, distillation, and memory.