Kai Tzu-iunn Ong

Welcome to my iunniverse

prof_pic.jpg

[google scholar] [x] [linkedin] [​ktio89(at)yonsei(dot)ac(dot)kr]

Hello. I am Kai, from Taiwan. I am a Ph.D. candidate in AI (advised by prof. Jinyoung Yeo). ​​Before AI, I’d studied mechanical engineering at National Taiwan University (B05) and Yonsei University. I am enthralled by the idea of building AI systems that are not merely convenient tools to replace human effort, but reliable partners that, together with humans, co-evolve and create greater societal value. Consequently, my research interest lies in the intersection of:

  • Agents & Dialogue Agents1
  • Human-centred AI / Human-AI Interaction2
  • AI for Science (e.g., healthcare)3,4


Publication Spotlight

* = Co-first authorship. The full publication list is here.
  1. New Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers via Priority Ranking
    Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Minseok Kang*, Dongwook Choi*, Junhee Cho, and 8 more authors
    NeurIPS 2026 (Camera-ready Coming Soon)
    [PDF]
  2. Success and Failure of Human–AI Collaboration in Clinical Reasoning: An Experimental Study on Challenging Real-world Cases
    Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Junwon Seo*, Hyojun Kim*, Jiwoo Kim*, and 4 more authors
    International Journal of Medical Informatics 2026 (Q1)  Best Poster Award 
    [PDF]
  3. Towards Lifelong Dialogue Agents via Timeline-based Memory Management
    Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Namyoung Kim*, Minju Gwak, Hyungjoo Chae, and 5 more authors
    NAACL 2025  Oral Presentation 
    [PDF]
  4. Large Language Models Are Clinical Reasoners: Reasoning-aware Diagnosis Framework with Prompt-generated Rationales
    Taeyoon Kwon*, Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Dongjin Kang, Seungjun Moon, and 6 more authors
    AAAI 2024
    [PDF]

Academic Experience

Yonsei University 2022 - Expected 2027
Ph.D. student in Artificial Intelligence
Layoff at 25 Fall for Taiwan's mandatory military service.

Yonsei University 2018 - 2022
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering

National Taiwan University 2016 - 2018 (Voluntarily Ceased)
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering
Class B05

Spoken Languages

Native:
Mandarin (traditional), Taiwanese Hokkien

Full professional proficiency (C2):
English (People often think I grew up speaking it), Korean (People often can't tell I am foreign)

Basic conversational ability (A1-2):
Japanese (Can chat for hours), Spanish (Can understand daily topics)

Baby (A0):
Thai

Activities

Conference Service:
  • Co-chair of ACL 2027 SRW.
  • Co-organiser of MuCaRD Challenge, MICCAI 2025
Mentoring:
  • Jiyoon Kim, Hyejun Cha, Jaehoon Kim, Minwoo Oh, Seungju Kim.
  • Hyun-Jun Jang (Fall, 2026): Paper accepted to a local Korean conference 2026.
  • Youmin Sung (Fall, 2026): Paper accepted to a local Korean conference 2026.
  • Seung Woo Baek (Spring, 2025): Paper accepted to a local Korean conference 2025.
  • Taeyoon Kwon (Fall, 2023): Papers accepted to AAAI 2024 and IOVS 2024.

Teaching (TA): Introduction to AI (AAI2250), Yonsei university (Fall, 2024); NLP (AAI3301), Yonsei university (Spring, 2024); AI expert program, Samsung, Korea (Jul, 2023 & Fall, 2024); Big data (CSI4121), Yonsei university (Spring, 2023).

Program reviewer (including secondary): Neurips (2026), AAAI (2023, 2024, 2025), ACL (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 (Great Review)), EMNLP (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026), EACL (2024)

Conference Attendance

Upcoming:  Neurips 2027 (Australia)

Past: ICML 2026 (Korea), NAACL 2025 (USA), ACL 2024 (Thailand), EMNLP 2023 (Singapore), IEEE ISBI 2023 (Colombia), Coling 2022 (Korea)

Interest

I enjoy weight training, martial arts, and learning languages.