I am Taewook [teug] Kim, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute (DSI). I work at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and AI. I received my Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where I was advised by Matt Kay. During my Ph.D., I was a research intern at Accenture Labs, Midjourney, and Toyota Research Institute.

Many great ideas begin with a hunch or a half-formed thought that is hard to put into words. People often turn to generative AI hoping it will complete the other half and add a spark. Instead, it fills the gaps with the most likely completions, producing results that look polished but are often clichéd. This polish makes it hard for people to tell whether they like an output because it reflects their intent or simply because it looks great.

My research has focused on designing and building interfaces that let people explore beyond these clichés and refine their own intent. I am now extending this work to study model behavior and internals, making AI more reliable and steerable. My goal is to accelerate creative and scientific work while keeping people as the primary actors.

I am always happy to talk about these or related topics. Feel free to reach out at first_name at uchicago dot edu, or schedule a chat with me.

Selected Publications

Personagram: Bridging Personas and Product Design for Creative Ideation with Multimodal LLMs
Taewook Kim, Matthew K. Hong, Yan-Ying Chen, Jonathan Q. Li, Monica P Van, Shabnam Hakimi, Matthew Kay, Matthew Klenk
arXiv. | arXiv | ▶︎ Demo video

Reverger: Scaffolding Recursive Divergence and Convergence in Story Ideation
Taewook Kim, Matthew Kay, Yuqian Sun, Melissa Roemmele, Max Kreminski, John Chung
arXiv. | arXiv | BibTeX | ▶︎ Demo video

Steering AI-Driven Personalization of Scientific Text for General Audiences
Taewook Kim, Dhruv Agarwal, Jordan Ackerman, Manaswi Saha
CSCW 2025. | arXiv | ACM DL | BibTeX | ▶︎ Demo video

Authors’ Values and Attitudes Towards AI-bridged Scalable Personalization of Creative Language Arts
Taewook Kim, Hyomin Han, Eytan Adar, Matthew Kay, John Chung
CHI 2024. | arXiv | ACM DL | BibTeX
🏅 ​ Best paper honorable mention (top 5%) ​

Opportunities in Mental Health Support for Informal Dementia Caregivers Suffering from Verbal Agitation
Taewook Kim, Hyeok Kim, Angela Roberts, Maia Jacobs, Matthew Kay
CSCW 2024. | arXiv | ACM DL | BibTeX | ▶︎ Project website

Love in Lyrics: An Exploration of Supporting Textual Manifestation of Affection in Social Messaging
Taewook Kim, Jungsoo Lee, Zhenhui Peng, and Xiaojuan Ma
CSCW 2019. | ACM DL | BibTeX | ▶︎ Project website