Knowledge and Democracy Lab

Welcome to the Knowledge and Democracy Lab! Based at KAIST, the Lab develops and applies computational and data scientific methods to understand how scientific and technological advances, including artificial intelligence and social media, shape politics and society.

Recruitment

The Lab seeks students who are enthusiastic about integrating theoretical insights with cutting-edge methods to leverage large-scale data for M.S. or Ph.D. degrees in Computational Social Science or Data Science. Students will be recruited through both the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences and the Graduate School of Data Science. Please feel free to reach out at taegyoon@kaist.ac.kr for questions about the application process, research opportunities, or to learn more about the Lab's current projects and ongoing initiatives.

Students

Jihwan Lim  Webpage

Jihwan is a Ph.D. student in Data Science. He received his B.A. in Politics from Yonsei University and an M.A. in Science and Technology Policy from KAIST. His research focuses on applying machine learning methods to identify and explain how authoritative allocations of values are made and their impacts on society. He has a particular interest in nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear politics.

Quang Minh Nguyen  Webpage

Minh is an M.S. student in Data Science. He is interested in reasoning, especially in social contexts or natural language reasoning tasks. He studies large language models (LLMs) to inspect their reasoning mechanisms (at representational and behavioural levels) and find out how we can make them better.

Hayden Arnold  Webpage

Hayden is an M.S. student in Computational Social Science. With a background in both computer science and political science, his specific research interests concern social media, network mapping and soft power analysis, and predicting societal trends. His methodological focus is on network science and predictive models, utilizing both machine learning and deep learning.

Joohee Choi  Webpage

Joohee, co-advised by Prof. Jeongwoo Jang, is an M.S. student in Computational Social Science. Her research focuses on detecting disinformation and hate speech in politicians' statements on social media and in congressional records using NLP methodologies, particularly fine-tuned large language models (LLMs). Recently, she has developed an interest in the validity of public opinion polls, exploring why results vary based on survey questions, sampling methods, and other factors.

Jiyoung Mo  Webpage

Jiyoung is an M.S. student in Computational Social Science. She received her B.A. in Media and Communication and English Linguistics from Hanyang University. She is interested in how large language models or political messaging on social media shape political communication and public opinion, particularly how multimodal framing by political actors influences audience engagement, affect, and polarization. Recently, she has focused on using natural language processing and computer vision to examine political communication on video-centered platforms. Her prior experience at KBS and the Korean National Assembly has informed her interest in new forms of political communication in digital environments.