Da-Young Kim

Korea Institute of Robot and Convergence

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About

Da-Young Kim is a leading researcher at the intersection of child-robot interaction, social robotics, and natural language processing. Her work focuses on designing intelligent, child-centric dialogue systems that can understand the unique linguistic patterns of children—including syntactic incompleteness, creative expressions, and pronunciation inaccuracies—to enable more natural and empathetic human-robot communication. In her highly cited 2024 paper, she pioneered the fine-tuning of large language models specifically for child-robot interaction, achieving a nuanced understanding of children’s utterance intentions. Kim also contributed to the development of a home robot companion service, co-designing 50 play activities and 70 conversations grounded in psychomotor therapy to cultivate children’s social-emotional skills. Her 2023 study introduced a conversational robot capable of detecting children’s emotions through a drawing journal activity, analyzing both their artwork and speech. With over 16 citations across her most influential works, Kim is recognized for advancing socially aware, developmentally appropriate robotic systems that support children’s emotional growth and communication.