About Jeseok

I was born and grew up in Seoul, which is one of the biggest and most dynamic cities in the world. Living in Seoul, I was influenced by diverse faces and spontaneous sub-cultures of the city, and started to pay attention to the aesthetics of daily life.

I majored in Economics at Seoul National University. Although I learned how to see the world from an analytical viewpoint, my interest was closer to human ethnography than numbers and mathematics. I decided to study another major in Information and Cultural Technology to see how individual people interact with digital technology. In the ICT department, Human-Computer Interaction and the creation and management of digital content were the main focus of my study. To acquire more technical skills in creating content, I minored in Visual Design in the department of Fine Art. Not only did I learn technical skills like composition and typography, but I also learned deeply about the history and social meaning of design. This is how I came to have such a diverse educational background.

From fall 2014 to winter 2016, I earned my M.S. in Information degree at School of Information at the University of Michigan, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction. I could learn technical skills in various fields of information science, and started my academic career as a researcher. I worked as a graduate research assistant for Professor Kevyn Collins-Thompson and Professor Sarita Schoenebeck.

I also continued my own individual research on assistive technology for the people with impairment and aged people. In summer 2015, I published two of my papers on designing an assistive technology solution for visually impaired people’s navigation and aged people’s online communication at MobileHCI.

From fall 2016, I started my Ph.D. program in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. My main research interest is assistive technology and research methods to investigate a group of people with special needs. Currently, I have been working on an assistive technology project to develop a solution for visually impaired people’s pedestrian navigation and a new type of feedback method. My interest also lies on the interaction and communication between gamers in e-sports, especially on social aspects like sexual discrimination among gamers.