@Terry Pettus Park, Seattle. (Photo Credit: Jessica K.)
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Spring 2027 MS/PhD Positions
All MS and PhD positions for Spring 2027 have been filled.
Students interested in joining our lab are highly encouraged to consider an internship or research collaboration beforehand, which provides an opportunity for both the student and the lab to assess mutual fit.
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🦅 I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yonsei University (starting Fall 2026).
I recently completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, where I was advised by Prof. Sehoon Ha and supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).
My research focuses on advancing human-centered embodied intelligence and control techniques that enable robots to make our lives better. Driven by this goal, my work centers on creating intelligent robotic guide dogs 🦮 capable of robust navigation and situation-aware control. Rather than being confined to a single application, this research spans from assisting visually impaired individuals to developing versatile robotic systems that guide and support people across various real-world scenarios.
đź”— **[LinkedIn] [Google Scholar]**
🏢 Office: TBD 📨 E-mail: [email protected]
IRIM Robotics Open House @GT, National Robotics Week, 2023
Poster@HRI2023
Navigation Explainability for Object Avoidance with LLMs for Assistive Robots
Courtney Young, Yi Lian, J. T. Kim, Sehoon Ha
IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN’26), 2026.
Designing a Robotic Guide Dog for Trustworthy Human-Robot Coexistence
J. T. Kim, Sehoon Ha
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'26), Pioneer Track, 2026 (23.0% acceptance rate).
Implicit behavioral cues for enhancing trust and comfort in robot social navigation [link]
Yi Lianđź”—, J. T. Kim, Sehoon Ha
Advanced Robotics (2025): 1–12. Best Presentation Award at Public Trust in Autonomous Systems Workshop at ICRA 2025
Do Looks Matter? Exploring Functional and Aesthetic Design Preferences for a Robotic Guide Dog [arXiv]
Aviv L. Cohav, A. Xinran Gong, J. T. Kim, Clint Zeagler, Sehoon Ha, Bruce N. Walker
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'25), 2025 (38.67% acceptance rate).
Understanding Expectations for a Robotic Guide Dog for Visually Impaired People [arXiv] [website]
J. T. Kim, Morgan Byrd, Jack L. Crandell, Bruce N. Walker, Greg Turk, Sehoon Ha
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'25), 2025 (25.0% acceptance rate).
Modeling social interaction dynamics using temporal graph networks [arXiv]
J. T. Kim, Archit Naik, Isuru Jayarathne, Sehoon Ha, Jouh Yeong Chew
IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN’24), 2024, Pasadena, CA.
Transforming a Quadruped into a Guide Robot for the Visually Impaired: Formalizing Wayfinding, Interaction Modeling, and Safety Mechanism [arXiv] [website]
J. T. Kim, Wenaho Yu, Yash Kothari, Bruce N. Walker, Jie Tan, Greg Turk, Sehoon Ha
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL’23), 2023, Atlanta, GA.
How to Train Your Guide Dog: Wayfinding and Safe Navigation with Human-Robot Modeling [link] [video]
J. T. Kim, Wenaho Yu, Jie Tan, Greg Turk, Sehoon Ha
International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’23) Late Breaking Report, 2023, Stockholm, Sweden.
Learning Robot Structure and Motion Embeddings using Graph Neural Networks [arXiv]
J. T. Kim, Jeongeun Park, Sungjoon Choi, Sehoon Ha
ICML 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning for Computational Design (ICML'22-ML4CompDesign), 2022, Baltimore, MD.
RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening [arXiv]
Sungha Choi, Sanghun Jung, Huiwon Yun, J. T. Kim, Seungryong Kim, Jaegul Choo
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'21), 2021, Virtual (Oral presentation, 4.7% acceptance rate).
Predicting Energetics Materials’ Crystalline Density from Chemical Structure by Machine Learning [link]
Phan Nguyen, Donald Loveland, J. T. Kim, Piyush Karande, Anna M. Hiszpanski, T. Yong-Jin Han
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 61.5 (2021): 2147-2158.
Observation Space Matters: Benchmark and Optimization Algorithm [arXiv]
J. T. Kim, Sehoon Ha
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'21), 2021, Xian, China.
Distilling Wikipedia Mathematical Knowledge into Neural Network Models [arXiv] [poster]
J. T. Kim, Mikel Landajuela Larma, Brenden K. Petersen
1st Mathematical Reasoning in General Artificial Intelligence Workshop at ICLR 2021 (ICLR'21-MATH-AI), 2021.
Deep symbolic regression: Recovering mathematical expressions from data via risk-seeking policy gradients [arXiv] [techexplore]
Brenden K. Petersen, Mikel Landajuela Larma, T. Nathan Mundhenk, Claudio P. Santiago, Soo K. Kim, J. T. Kim
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR'21), 2021, Virtual (Oral presentation).
An Interactive Visualization Platform for Deep Symbolic Regression [pdf]
J. T. Kim, Sookyung Kim, Brenden K. Petersen
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'20), Demonstrations Track, 2020, Yokohama, Japan (26.7% acceptance rate).
Cars Can’t Fly Up in the Sky: Improving Urban-Scene Segmentation via Height-driven Attention Networks [pdf] [supp] [video]
Sungha Choi, J. T. Kim, Jaegul Choo
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'20), 2020, Seattle, WA (22.1% acceptance rate).
Optimizing 3D structure of H2O molecule using DDPG [pdf] [poster]
Soo Kyung Kim, Peggy Li, J. T. Kim, Piyush Karande, T. Yong Han
ICML 2019 Workshop on Reinforcement Learning for Real Life (ICML'19-RL4RealLife), 2019, Long Beach, CA.
