Hi, I am a final year Ph.D. candidate in the ECE department of the University of Texas at Austin. I have had wonderful years of learning and working with my advisor Prof. Constantine Caramanis.

Before moving to Austin, I got a Bachelor’s Degree at Electrical Engineering department, Seoul National University (SNU), Korea, in 2016.

Research Interest

I am broadly interested in theoretical aspects of machine/statistical learning and optimization, with emphasis on fundamental questions well motivated by real applications. Specifically, I have been focused on theoretical questions arising from statistical inference of latent variable models, and reinforcement learning in partially observable systems. I believe in some nice connections between these two problems. I am also interested in other research topics such as robust statistics, multitask/meta learning, and stochastic approximation.

News

• I will be starting my Postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since Fall 2022.

• (5/15/22) One paper accepted to ICML 2022.

• (4/15/22) Presented my work on Reward-Mixing MDPs at MLOPT Idea Seminar in Wisconsin-Madison.

• (9/28/21) Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2021!

• (8/21/21) I got married with Siwan!!! <3^2

• (5/18/21) Presented my work on Latent MDPs at virtual RL Theory Seminar.

• (3/3/21) I received a UT graduate continuing fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year.

• (1/15/21) Done with my proposal, and now become a Ph.D. candidate.

Other aspects of life

I used to play the piano, mostly the pieces of Beethoven and Chopin. My favoriate songs to play are Chopin’s Etude 25-11, Chopin’s Ballade 4, and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 29. I am also a huge fan of rock and metal musics. My favorite bands are Skid row (in late 80s-90s), Slipknot, Stryper (glad that they are still active!). These days, I often listen to Game OST when I study or relax.

I am a fan of the game of Go, and enjoy playing it (mostly online) these days. Before I start my PhD, I have long played Starcraft and League of Legneds throughout my life, but these games require great physical which I cannot help anymore. Now I rather play more relaxing single player games – I am also a fan of JRPG and platformer style games.