This page outlines how my research interests have evolved since the first year of college for those who enjoy listening to other people’s lives as I do myself. I always found it helpful and interesting to hear other researcher’s preceding paths before landing into their current interests especially when their trajectory is rather non-traditional, because the concepts and perspectives that don’t seem to connect when seen individually often do converge beautifully when you see what’s been going on behind the scenes.
Freshman Year: Physics and Information
Before I start I would like to publicly thank my undergraduate institution, the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University (SNU CLS) for encouraging my chaotic journey, which is also addressed in the graduation speech (in Korean!) I was honored to give. It is truly an exceptional program in South Korea for minds like myself.
As a high school kid I was one of those obsessed with AP Physics and the Physics Olympiad purely because of the joy of studying mathematically elegant models of how objects interact but also realized that my heart starts pounding even harder when I think about the myriad interactions in the society we live in.
As a freshman I enjoyed taking courses in the history and philosophy of science and CLS seminars on the physics, philosophy, biology, and sociology of knowledge and information in addition to the honors calculus and physics sequence, trying to connect physics with society. I was mesmerized by information and network theory along with how insights from physics could be used to understand social systems, unaware of the many caveats ahead of my road for pursuing such research.
Sophomore Year: Knowledge Ecology
When it was time to declare my second major at CLS (you can probably infer what my first one is) I had no idea besides my feelings towards social science and information/knowledge. At the start of my sophomore year I registered for a junior-year course called the Global Politics of Information, attracted to all the words (networks, complexity, emergence, information, technology and so on) in the syllabus. This was taught by Prof. Sangbae Kim who later became my advisor for the student-designed major called knowledge ecology. Since then I have roamed across Mt. Gwanak to hop around the departments of sociology, economics, political science, information science, and education for a single major, with the ambition to embrace different perspectives in studying the social science of knowledge formation and propagation. The Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago was a great reference for designing my major.
Military Service: Complexity
Like most South Korean men I was mandated to serve in the military for about two years. Also like in most cases this was not the most exciting part of my life but I was privileged to serve as an English-Korean translator participating in several missions in collaboration with the US Army where I met some of my best friends outside of SNU and academia.
During my little free time I enjoyed the break from SNU coursework and began taking courses (!) from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) where I was fascinated by the dynamic interaction between the system and the environment. I also basked in books about chaos, information theory, and the use of big data and information systems in social science research, ironically in a digitally isolated environment.
Junior Year: Computation + Society
One thing I learned through that digital isolation is that I need to write computer programs to do anything related to complexity and information!
I joined the Human Centered Computing Lab at SNU to learn the basics of data science and machine learning led by Prof. Bongwon Suh. As a complex systems enthusiast who advocates diversity and interdisciplinary research I was obsessed with the question “is the complexity science community really interdisciplinary, or is it just a collection of heterogeneous disciplines with little actual interaction?” I am thankful to Bongwon for teaching me everything I need to know in publishing my first paper. While I was aware that we should look into social systems at multiple scales, this was my first experience to actually do it computationally.
I spent my summer at KAIST and joined a Korean history data analysis project co-led by two physicists Profs. Juyong Park and Hawoong Jeong. At the end of the summer I reached out to Prof. Javier Cha, a digital historian at SNU CLS for advice in analyzing longitudinal historical data and this is the moment when my network analysis has turned into a paper in Korean history. I was building my strength of weak ties!
Senior Year: Mathematics for Multiscale
Playing with data was fun, but I wanted to get a more thorough understanding in the mathematics behind networks and complex systems.
At the start of my senior year I was fortunate to work with Prof. Bryan Daniels at the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems thanks to my exchange student program at Arizona State University. We worked on developing novel algorithms and metrics to measure the meso-level properties of networks by applying clique problems. This was my attempt to mathematically formulate ways to analyze networks at multiple scales, extending to my multi-level network data analysis in the previous year.
I finished my thesis in physics while working closely with Alexander Siegenfeld and Blake Elias at the New England Complex Systems Institute. I constructed mathematical theory and wrote proofs for the coarse-graining and renormalization of disease dynamics using statistical physics, linear algebra, differential equations, and Markov processes. This project taught me the importance of evaluating the assumptions in models that may not be generalized across different scales. I also learned how to think about not only different scales of interactions but also interactions between different scales.
Post-Graduate: Cognitive Science + NLP
It became clear over the years that my research motivation at the coarsest scale is to understand collective human behavior. Just as I realized that a deep investigation into human cognition is unavoidable for such topics, I met just the right mentor.
Right after graduation I was thrilled to work with Prof. Simon DeDeo at Carnegie Mellon University who is also part of SFI with doctoral training in physics. Simon exposed me to the fascinating world of cognitive science and natural language processing as we constructed methods to classify how people make arguments in the wild. We were able to discover strong signals for social aspects of argument-making when it comes to predicting their efficacy, with implications that people may not only argue just for the sake of claiming that they have the correct information but possibly for the sake of sharing their view at a larger system.
Present: Management Science
At the start of 2022, I was fortunate to receive offers from the strongest PhD programs in computer science, psychology, and across many different fields in business schools. Through the tough decision process I felt the need to complement my skill set with the ability to perform experimental design for causal inference and understand the nuts and bolts of machine learning algorithms. I am extremely happy to be in a PhD program where I am encouraged to continue my interdisciplinary discussions while honing my mathematical fluency that I have always been obsessed with!