Dongyeop Kang (DK) @ University of Minnesota

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)

No teaching in Spring 2025

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:

Writing & Thinking
(AI or/and Human) Writing, Workflow, Planning&Reasoning
Alignment
Societal Alignment, Diversity Modeling, Personalization
Interaction
Interactive and Collaborative AI systems
Cognition
Perception, Interpretability, Evaluation

Publication ( By Date | By Topic | Google Scholar )

News (read more)

(Apr 2025) Zae Myung Kim won the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, focusing on meta-scaffolding of LLMs.
(Apr 2025) Thanks Naver Corporation for a generous gift and key research collaboration.
(Jan 2025) It's grateful to receive the NSF NAIRR award (NCSA 320,000 GPU Hours) to build scientific foundational models for trustworthy scholarly writing and discovery.
(Dec 2024) James Mooney won the Amazon MLSys Fellowship for 2025-2026, focusing on Algorithmic and Agentic efficiency. Karin de Langis won the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, focusing on Cognitively Informed Natural Language Generation.
(Sep 2024) Two papers (Dynamic Multi-reward Alignment, Diversity Extraction) are accepted at EMNLP Main 2024
(Aug 2024) Thanks Grammarly again for a generous gift and key research collaboration.
(Jul 2024) I am co-organizing the first workshop on Pluralistic Alignment workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
(Jun 2024) Excited to receive Agent Benchmark Grant from Open Philanthropy for collceting lawyer benchmark dataset (w Daniel Schwarcz, Brett McDonnell)
(May 2024) Four papers (Thread-of-Subtlety, CoBBLEr, Self-Video-Alignment, VQA Reasoning) are accepted at ACL 2024
(Mar 2024) Some of our recent work on writing assistant are featured in UMN CS (link)
(Dec 2023) Excited to receive a grant from UMN CTSI for the development of AI Assistant for Non-English Speaking Clinical Trial Partipants (/w Jennifer Needle and Gwenyth Fischer)
(Dec 2023) Thrid In2Writing workshop (focused on "Dark Sides: Envisioning, Understanding, and Preventing Harmful Effects of Writing Assistants") will be held at CHI 2024 in Hawaii.
(Oct 2023) We are grateful to OpenAI, Cohere, Google, Amazon, and Oracle for their generous support of our computing needs
(Aug 2023) Excited to receive Cisco Research Award on Generative AI
(Aug 2023) Excited to receive a genrous gift from Accenture Labs
(Jun 2023) Excited to receive the UMN Early Innovation Fund
(Apr 2023) Very honored to receive 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award (NTFA) in 2022-2023 .
(Nov 2022) Our second In2Writing workshop will be held at CHI 2023 in Hamburg, Germany
(Oct 2022) Very excited to receive a generous gift from Grammarly .
(Oct 2022) Minnesota NLP seminar is back in Fall 2022!
(Jun 2022) Very honored to receive Sony Research Faculty Innovation Award .
(May 2022) Received the best paper award on human-in-the-loop interative text revision from In2Writing workshop at ACL 2022
(May 2022) At ACL 2022, our group presents two papers ( iterative text revision and human-in-the-loop interative text revision) and co-organizes Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing) workshop
(Nov 2021) I am co-organizing "CtrlGen: Controllable Generative Modeling in Language and Vision" workshop at NeurIPS 2021.
(Apr 2021) I will be joining Minnesota CSE as an assistant professor in 2021 Fall.
(Jun 2020) Joined UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral scholar, working with Marti A. Hearst.
(May 2020) Passed my Ph.D thesis defense. Check out my thesis!

Awards and Grants (read more)

2025 Naver Research Gift Award
2025 DDC Computational Creativity Grant, PI (w Im)
2025 MnRI Seed Grant, Co-PI with Hong (PI), Choi, and Wang
2025 NSF NAIRR Pilot Award
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)

(May 2024) Talk at Megagon Labs with Debarati Das
(Mar 2024) Guest lecture at Hubbard School of Journalism at UMN
(Nov 2023) Talk at Thomson Reuters
(Sep 2023) Guest lecture at Penn State University
(Sep 2023) Talk at UMN NLP/IE group
(Aug 2023) Talk at 3M NTFA Symposium
(May 2023) Talk at Microsoft Research
(Apr 2023) Panel discussion at UMN Law, ChatGPT and the Future of AI-Assisted Professionals
(Apr 2023) Interview with UMN CS, Meet the Faculty
(Apr 2023) Interview with Echo on future of AI in classroom (GPT or GPA)
(Feb 2023) Talk at Google People+AI Research (PAIR)
(Dec 2022) Talk at Hyundai AI
(Nov 2022) Talk at NSF ROSE-HUB
(Sep 2022) Talk at 3M NTFA Symposium
(Aug 2022) Talk at Yonsei University
(Aug 2022) Talk at KAIST CS
(Aug 2022) Talk at LG AI Research
(Aug 2022) Talk at Samsung Research
(Jul 2022) Talk at Grammarly
(Jul 2022) Talk at Thomson Reuters Labs
(Mar 2022) Talk at USC ISI AI Seminar
(Feb 2022) Talk and panel discussion at CMU LTI Seminar
(Dec 2021) Talk at GaTech NLP Seminar
(Nov 2021) Talk at Minnesota Robotic Institute Colloquium
(Nov 2021) Talk at KAIST SE Colloquium
(Nov 2021) Talk at Naver Labs Europe
(Aug 2021) Talk at Grammarly AI, Aug 2021
(Aug 2021) Talk at SNU Summer AI school, Aug 2021
(March 2021) Talk at University of Wisconsin - Madison, CS Department, March 2021
(March 2021) Talk at University of Rochester, CS Department, March 2021
(March 2021) Talk at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, CSE Colloquium, March 2021
(Feb 2021) Talk at KAIST, AI Department, Feb 2021
(Nov 2020) Talk at KAIST AI Colloquium, Nov 2020
(Nov 2020) Talk at GIST EECS Colloquium, Nov 2020
(July 2020) Talk at Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Workshop, July 2020
(July 2020) Talk at CMU LTI Seminar
(July 2020) Talk at POSTECH AI Seminar

Services (read more)

Advisory Board of In2Writing at NAACL 2025
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