Kahyun Choi
Kahyun Choi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UIUC, she was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. She received her PhD from the School of Information Sciences at UIUC and previously worked as a software engineer at Naver, an Internet company in Korea.
Her research applies computational methods and machine learning to cultural data across multiple modalities, including audio and text. She studies the computational analysis of poetry, music, and musicality in speech; human–AI co-creation of cultural datasets and metadata; ethical AI workflows for digital libraries and cultural collections; and AI literacy education in public library contexts.
Her interdisciplinary work spans two core research areas, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Digital Humanities (DH), within the broader field of Information Science. Her collaborative work also appears in venues in Library Science, Education, and Human Computer Interaction.
She has received several recognitions, including the 2022 IMLS Early Career Research Development Project Grant, the 2021 IMLS National Leadership Grant, the 2021 Luddy Faculty Fellowship, and the 2026–2027 UIUC BRIDGE Award. She also received the 2023 IU Trustees Teaching Award and was recognized as Outstanding on the University of Illinois List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent in 2025.
As an educator, she has developed and taught graduate-level courses on machine learning for cultural data and AI literacy programs for youth in public libraries.
My Research Team
You Peng
PhD student in Information Sciences at UIUC (since 2025)
You Peng received his B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and his M.S. in Information Management from UIUC iSchool. He joined my group in 2025 and currently serves as a Research Assistant on the IMLS CAREER project.
We are working on designing and building AI-enhanced digital libraries to improve the accessibility of poetry collections, developing annotation tools and viewers to support human-centered annotation practices with AI-assisted workflows, and analyzing the mood and themes of poetry across multicultural groups. We are also examining digitized textual corpora from new perspectives in light of recent advances in AI technologies.
William Sideri
PhD student in Information Sciences at UIUC (since 2025)
Will earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature from Colby College and his M.A. in Digital Communication and Media/Multimedia from the University of Chicago. He joined my group in 2025 and currently serves as a Research Assistant on the IMLS CAREER project.
We are currently examining Shakespeare’s works from a classification perspective, including questions around the definition and ambiguity of author-annotated labels. We are also reviewing literature to come up with a concrete project exploring the relationship between stylistic features in poetry and other aspects such as poetic prosody. In addition, we are developing an evaluation framework to assess how well AI understands poetry.