Taesik Gong
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology · Computer Science
About the Lab
Professor Taesik Gong's research lab specializes in mobile sensing and intelligent human-computer interaction, focusing on developing adaptive, context-aware systems that leverage deep learning and sensor technologies for real-world applications. The lab explores test-time adaptation, meta-learning, and on-device AI to address distribution shifts and individual variability in user behaviors and device characteristics. Key research directions include wearable sensing for health monitoring (e.g., eating detection), gesture and object recognition via passive sensing (e.g., knock-based interaction), and emoji recommendation in conversational AI, all aimed at creating efficient, personalized, and privacy-preserving mobile applications. The lab emphasizes practical deployment, energy efficiency, and robustness in real-world, non-i.i.d. environments.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
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Selected Papers
15Recent improvements in deep learning and hardware support offer a new breakthrough in mobile sensing; we could enjoy context-aware services and mobile healthcare on a mobile device powered by artificial intelligence. However, most related studies perform well only with a certain level of similarity between trained and target data distribution, while in practice, a specific user's behaviors and device make sensor inputs different. Consequently, the performance of such applications might suffer in
While smartphones have enriched our lives with diverse applications and functionalities, the user experience still often involves manual cumbersome inputs. To purchase a bottle of water for instance, a user must locate an e-commerce app, type the keyword for a search, select the right item from the list, and finally place an order. This process could be greatly simplified if the smartphone identifies the object of interest and automatically executes the user preferred actions for the object. We
Test-time adaptation (TTA) is an emerging paradigm that addresses distributional shifts between training and testing phases without additional data acquisition or labeling cost; only unlabeled test data streams are used for continual model adaptation. Previous TTA schemes assume that the test samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), even though they are often temporally correlated (non-i.i.d.) in application scenarios, e.g., autonomous driving. We discover that most existing
Various automated eating detection wearables have been proposed to monitor food intakes. While these systems overcome the forgetfulness of manual user journaling, they typically show low accuracy at outside-the-lab environments or have intrusive form-factors (e.g., headgear). Eyeglasses are emerging as a socially-acceptable eating detection wearable, but existing approaches require custom-built frames and consume large power. We propose MyDJ, an eating detection system that could be attached to
As emojis are increasingly used in everyday online communication such as messaging, email, and social networks, various techniques have attempted to improve the user experience in communicating emotions and information through emojis. Emoji recommendation is one such example in which machine learning is applied to predict which emojis the user is about to select, based on the user’s current input message. Although emoji suggestion helps users identify and select the right emoji among a plethora
Many applications utilize sensors on mobile devices and apply deep learning for diverse applications. However, they have rarely enjoyed mainstream adoption due to many different <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">individual conditions</i> users encounter. Individual conditions are characterized by users’ unique behaviors and different devices they carry, which collectively make sensor inputs different. It is impractical to train coun
Many applications utilize sensors in mobile devices and machine learning to provide novel services. However, various factors such as different users, devices, and environments impact the performance of such applications, thus making the domain shift (i.e., distributional shift between the training domain and the target domain) a critical issue in mobile sensing. Despite attempts in domain adaptation to solve this challenging problem, their performance is unreliable due to the complex interplay a
While people primarily communicate with text in mobile chat applications, they are increasingly using visual elements such as images, emojis, and memes. Using such visual elements could help users communicate clearly and make chatting experience enjoyable. However, finding and inserting contextually appropriate images during the chat can be both tedious and distracting. We introduce MilliCat, a real-time image suggestion system that recommends images that match the chat content within a mobile c
Speech emotion recognition (SER) models typically rely on costly human-labeled data for training, making scaling methods to large speech datasets and nuanced emotion taxonomies difficult. We present LanSER, a method that enables the use of unlabeled data by inferring weak emotion labels via pre-trained large language models through weakly-supervised learning. For inferring weak labels constrained to a taxonomy, we use a textual entailment approach that selects an emotion label with the highest e
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address distributional shifts between training and testing data using only unlabeled test data streams for continual model adaptation. However, most TTA methods assume benign test streams, while test samples could be unexpectedly diverse in the wild. For instance, an unseen object or noise could appear in autonomous driving. This leads to a new threat to existing TTA algorithms; we found that prior TTA algorithms suffer from those noisy test samples as they bli
We use smartphones and their apps for almost every daily activity. For instance, to purchase a bottle of water online, a user has to unlock the smartphone, find the right e-commerce app, search the name of the water product, and finally place an order. This procedure requires manual, often cumbersome, input of a user, but could be significantly simplified if the smartphone can identify an object and automatically process this routine. We present Knocker, an object identification technique that o
Research Areas
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