Kevin Hyekang[?]  Joo

I am a second-year Master's student (M.S. in CS '23) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I am advised by Prof. David W. Jacobs. My primary research interest lies in Video Understanding & Spatiotemporal Analysis (e.g., Action Recognition, Video Anomaly Detection, Multispectral Satellite Imagery, Time-Series), and my favorite areas of overlap with the topic include Multimodality, Zero-Shot Learning, and Cognitive Neuroscience.

I received a B.S. from the University of Maryland, College Park, in May 2021, where I majored in Computer Science with specialization in Machine Learning and minored in Technology Entrepreneurship.

Outside of research, I like to draw a sketch, travel around, and appreciate artworks. In addition, as a supporter of diversity, equity, and inclusion and as a believer in the power of peculiarity and unconventionalism, I like to take part in workshops or events promoting diversity as a hobby. I am always open for invitation to be a guest speaker on diversity!

*I am currently looking for a Ph.D. position starting in Fall!*


Previously, I have been fortunate enough to have opportunities to conduct research on Action Recognition and Video Anomaly Detection with Prof. Ngan Le from the AICV Lab at the University of Arkansas and on ML-based Scalable Optimization and Zero-Shot Learning with Prof. Leilani Battle from the Interactive Data Lab at the University of Washington.

News
  • 12/22: Receives an invitation to the CRA Grad Cohort Workshop '23 (Hawaii | Scholarship by CRA)
  • 11/22: Receives a research internship offer from MIT Lincoln Lab for Summer 2023 to work on Video Understanding
  • 9/22: Attends the Grace Hopper Conference '22 (Virtual | Scholarship by UMD)
  • 9/22: Attends the ACM Richard Tapia Conference '22 (Washington, D.C. | Scholarship by UMD)
  • 8/22: Receives the Graduate Assistantship from the University of Maryland as a Part-Time Teaching Assistant for CMSC131 (Object-Oriented Programming I) in Fall 2022
  • 6/22: Attends CVPR 2022 (New Orleans, LA | Scholarship by CVPR & UMD) and selected to serve as one of the 11 graduate student mentors at the CVPR Academy Workshop
  • 6/22: Attends the 41st ACM SIGMOD Conference (Remote)
  • 5/22: Starts research internship at the University of Arkansas over the summer
  • 5/22: Serves as a part-time teaching assistant for Google Applied Machine Learning Intensive Summer Program
  • 3/22: Attends the CRA Grad Cohort Workshop for IDEALS: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills (San Diego, CA | Scholarship by UW)
  • 3/22: Attends the 37th CSUN Assistive Technology Conference (Anaheim, CA | Scholarship by UW)
  • 2/22: A paper [3] accepted at ACM SIGMOD 2022
  • 1/22: Receives the Graduate Assistantship from the University of Maryland as a Full-Time Teaching Assistant for MSML641 (Natural Language Processing) and CMSC426 (Computer Vision) in Spring 2022
  • 12/21: Serves as a Student Committee Member for Graduate School Admissions for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, reviewing over 20 applications (2022 Cycle)
  • 12/21: Completes the Semester with a GPA of 4.0
  • 10/21: A paper [2] accepted at BMVC 2021 for an oral presentation
  • 8/21: Receives the Graduate Assistantship as a Full-Time Research Assistant for Fall 2021 from the University of Maryland
  • 7/21: Selected as one of 12 receipients of $10,000 Google Scholarship in the year of 2021, funded by Google, for my postgraduate studies in Computer Science
  • 6/21: Starts Research Internship with Dr. Leilani Battle at the University of Washington through the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by NSF
  • 5/21: Graduates from the University of Maryland with a B.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning Track) and a Minor in Technology Entrepreneurship
  • 6/20: Starts Software Engineering Internship at Amazon Devices (Remote)
  • 6/19: Starts Software Engineering Internship at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Herndon, VA
Publications
[4] CLIP-TSA: CLIP-Assisted Temporal Self-Attention for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection new
Hyekang Kevin Joo, Khoa Vo, Kashu Yamazaki, Ngan Le
Under Review
computer vision
tags: video anomaly detection, activity analysis, vision-language, clip, temporal self-attention
pdf / bibtex

In this paper, the magnitude-based video anomaly detection model is optimized in a weakly-supervised manner. The proposed training pipeline notably leverages the ViT-encoded visual features from CLIP, in contrast with the conventional C3D or I3D features in the domain, to extract discriminative representations efficiently and nominates the snippets of interest with the proposed Temporal Self-Attention.
[3] Demonstration of VegaPlus: Optimizing Declarative Visualization Languages
Junran Yang, Hyekang Kevin Joo, Sai S. Yerramreddy, Siyao Li, Dominik Moritz, Leilani Battle
ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Conference, 2022
machine learning hci
ACM SIGMOD Demo '22 statistics [h5-index: 68]: 33.8% accept
tags: scalable optimization, data visualization, dataflow, machine learning
conference / video / github / pdf / bibtex

We propose a system that takes declarative specifications to automatically offload computation-intensive processing to a separate DBMS by optimizing visualization plans through machine learning techniques. In this project, I was primarily in charge of scalable optimization aspect of the project.

[ Note: This is an REU project that I worked on with Dr. Battle and Dr. Moritz in Summer 2021. Keep an eye out for the extended version of the work, to be done and submitted in Fall 2022! ]
[2] AEI: Actors-Environment Interaction with Adaptive Attention for Temporal Action Proposals Generation
Khoa Vo, Hyekang Joo, Kashu Yamazaki, Sang Truong, Kris Kitani, Minh-Triet Tran, Ngan Le
The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2021 (Oral Presentation)
computer vision
BMVC '21 statistics [h5-index: 75]: 40 (3.33%) oral / 437 (36.23%) accept / 1206 submissions
tags: temporal action proposal generation, activitynet
conference / github / pdf / bibtex

The human perceives the establishment of an action in a video through the interaction between an actor and the surrounding environment. We borrow the idea in producing the proposed Actor-Environment Interaction network.
[1] Guided Hyperparameter Tuning Through Visualization and Inference
Hyekang Joo, Calvin Bao, Ishan Sen, Furong Huang, Leilani Battle
arXiv, 2021
machine learning hci
tags: hyperparameter tuning, AutoML
pdf / bibtex

We create an AutoML tool and run evaluations on machine translation and image classification through user studies.

*PI & Co-PI are marked green on mouse-hover

**My legal name on the U.S. Passport is  Kevin Hyekang Joo, but I occasionally put my name as  Hyekang Kevin Joo  on papers.

Service
UMDCS

Graduate School Admissions

Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park

Student Committee Member for CS Graduate School Admissions
Spring 2022
UMDACM

Student Groups

Association for Computing Machinery
University of Maryland, College Park

President
2020-2021 2019-2020

Vice President
2021-2022

Secretary
2018-2019
ALD Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society
University of Maryland, College Park

Webmaster
*2022-2023 **2021-2022 2020-2021 2019-2020

*Serves as an Auxiliary Co-Webmaster
**Received the prestigious Order of the Torch Award of the Year '22
cybersecurity Cybersecurity Club
University of Maryland, College Park

Secretary
2018-2019
google-ed

Mentorship

Google Applied Machine Learning Intensive Summer Program
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Teaching Assistant
Summer 2022
After partnering with the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering and Google, the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas is hosting the Google Applied Machine Learning Intensive Bootcamp for 10 weeks over the summer to introduce undergraduate (URM-focused) college students to applied machine learning concepts.

[ See More ]

i4c Diversity & Inclusion in Computing Education (DICE)
University of Maryland, College Park

Mentor
2022-2023 2021-2022
bitcamp IEEE/CVF CVPR 2022
CVPR Academy: HBCU/MI (Historically Black Colleges and Universities/Minority Institutions) Workshop

Mentor & Poster Presenter
Summer 2022
diversity

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) Conference

Tapia Conference
2022 2021
Grace Hopper Conference
2022 2021
CSUN Assistive Technology Conference
2022
CRA Grad Cohort Workshop for IDEALS:
Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills
2023 2022

Teaching Assistant Experience
UMDCS

Computer Science TA @ UMD

Computer Vision (CMSC426)
Instructor: Dr. Mohammad Nayeem Teli
Spring 2022
Natural Language Processing (MSML641)
Instructor: Dr. Shabnam Tafreshi
Spring 2022
Object-Oriented Programming I (CMSC131)
Instructor: Senior Lecturer Nelson Padua-Perez
*Fall 2022 *Spring 2020 *Fall 2019
*Led two discussion sessions in each semester as a Teacher TA

Why so enthusiastic about being a Teacher TA?

Knowledge is meant to be shared! I enjoy interacting with people and sharing my knowledge with others! Oftentimes, I serve as a guest speaker, too, at academic clubs, dicussing my research, industry, and academic backgrounds with fellow students! :)

Here are seven other reasons I strongly prefer to be a Teaching TA for CMSC131:

1. Greatly improves my skills for oral presentation
2. Forms social connections with newcomers
3. Excellent memory refresher of Java
4. Enables self-evaluation of my communication skill
5. Student-evaluation of my skills at the end of sem
6. Builds up confidence as a speaker
7. Solid setting for practicing my leadership,
     organization, and on-the-fly Q&A skills

hinman

Technology & Engineering Entrepreneurship TA @ UMD

Entrepreneurial Opportunity Analysis and Decision-Making in Technology Ventures (ENES210)
Instructor: Dr. James Green
Spring 2021
Marketing High-Technology Products and Innovations (ENES462)
Instructor: Lecturer Michael Pratt
Spring 2021
Leading and Financing the Technology Venture (ENES466)
Instructor: Lecturer Michael Pratt
Spring 2021


Undergraduate Internship Experience
amazon

Amazon

Amazon Devices
Denver, CO (Remote Internship)
Summer 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Herndon, VA
Summer 2019

cocacoda
0xC0C4C0DA
(It's not a typical soda!)


HKJ

v22.12.31


My Erdös number is 3
[ Erdös - Michael Stonebraker - Leilani Battle - Me ]


More About Me :) Special Thanks