Dongyeop Kang (DK)
Assistant Professor
Computer Science & Engineering
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
259 Shepherd

dongyeop@umn.edu
Minnesota NLP
MnRI / MCAL / DSI / TextGroup / LIL

Ph.D. Students
Check out the full members of Minnesota NLP. To join our group, read page and fill out form.

Teaching (past courses)

For 2024-2025, Minnesota NLP has 1-2 Ph.D. openings, and UMN CS has 1-2 faculty openings focused on NLP. Please contact me if you are interested in.

I'm interested in developing human-centered AI systems. My primary goal is to develop cognitively-aligned AI models for experts, people, and society (research statement). Human-centered AI research seeks to bridge the cognitive gap between human and machine, and to advance our understanding of human cognition while creating AI that supports different human groups: expert thinking, societal values, and diverse objectives of individuals.
  • Cognitive scaffolding of LLMs: Collect different types of human cognition signals from explanations, explicit thinking traces, eye-tracking, or implicit feedback, and develop cognitively-inspired AI models that are capable of planning, abstraction, and complex reasoning.
  • Pushing to the expert-level AI: Develop interactive systems to facilitate productive and creative collaboration with human experts like scientists, lawyers, and teachers, and create complex, compositional, and domain-specific expert-level benchmarks
  • Societal alignment with pluralistic people values: Develop inclusive NLP systems that align with diverse and subjective perspectives, and develop pluralistic data representation, alignment models, and evaluation metrics.

Research Topics:

Publication ( By Date | By Topic | Google Scholar )

News (read more)

Awards (read more)
  • 2024 Grammarly Research Gift Award
  • 2024 Open Philanthropy, Agent Benchmark Grant, PI (w Daniel Schwarcz, Brett McDonnell)
  • 2024 UMN DSI Seed Grant (w Mingyi Hong)
  • 2022-2024 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award (NTFA)
  • 2023 UMN CTSI Grant (/w Jennifer Needle and Gwenyth Fischer)
  • 2023 Cisco Research Award
  • 2023 Accenture Research Gift Award
  • 2023 Computing Supports from OpenAI, Cohere, Google, Amazon, and Oracle
  • 2023 UMN Early Innovation Fund
  • 2023 MnRI Seed Grant (w Karthik Desingh)
  • 2022 Grammarly Research Gift Award
  • 2022 Best paper award, In2Writing workshop at ACL
  • 2022 Sony Research Faculty Innovation Award
  • 2018 Top Reviewers, NeurIPS and ACL
  • 2018 Allen Institute for AI Research Fellowship
  • 2016 CMU Presidential Fellowship
  • 2013 SMBA Startup Investment Prize
  • 2011 ILJU Foundation Ph.D. Scholarship

Talks (read more)

Services (read more)
  • Founder and Co-organizer of Pluralistic Alignment workshop at NeurIPS 2024
  • Steering committee, Workshop on Customizable NLP (CustomNLP4U)
  • Senior PC at AAAI 2024
  • Area Chair at EMNLP 2023
  • Founder and Co-organizer of In2Writing at ACL 2022, CHI 2023, and CHI 2024
  • Founder and Co-organizer of CtrlGen at NeurIPS 2021
  • Program committee at ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI