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 understanding and harnessing the capabilities and risks of LLMs, and better use them for the benefit of human, society, and experts. My group's current research is focused on building human-centric NLP systems by learning from human perception, societal values, and interaction with experts:
  • 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