Executive Summary
🎯 Core Competencies
Expert in AI/ML system design & implementation, large-scale distributed systems architecture, digital transformation strategy, Korean NLP engine development
🚀 Key Achievements
Built systems processing hundreds of thousands of transactions/day at Airbnb, improved Twitter search quality, established Korean NLP open-source ecosystem
💼 Current Role
CEO of Tobl AI developing AI automation platform, leading digital transformation research at Taejae Future Consensus Institute
🌍 Global Experience
10+ years in Silicon Valley, developed and operated core systems at global tech companies like Airbnb and Twitter
Vision
To maximize human creativity and productivity through AI technology, and create new governance models for the digital era
Todo List
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Highlights
- Digital Team Lead at Taejae Future Consensus Institute — Research on digital transformation's impact on governance and society
- CEO & Founder of Tobl AI Inc. — AI Consulting and Automation
- Former CEO of OXOpolitics Inc. — Political data platform innovator
- Former Senior Software Engineer at Airbnb and Twitter
- Expert in AI/ML Systems, Digital Transformation, IR, NLP, Payment Systems
- Author: "AI, War of the Gods" (2024), "OXO Playbook" (2023)
- Creator of open-korean-text (open source)
- Technical: Java, React, Firebase, Typescript, Scala, Python, Hadoop, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails
Tech Stack
Experience
Taejae Future Consensus Institute — Team Lead
SEP 2024 - PRESENT
- Lead research on governance & society in digital era
- Frameworks for digital-era governance and social transformation
- Study AI's role in political and economic systems
Tobl AI Inc. — CEO & Founder
DEC 2023 - PRESENT
AI automation platform
OXOpolitics — CEO & Founder
MAY 2020 - DEC 2023
Political data platform — oxopolitics.com
Airbnb — Senior Software Engineer
FEB 2016 - MAY 2020
- Transportation Vertical Search (backend/frontend)
- Payments (Billing, Host Commerce, Incentives)
- Payout system & Resolution Center backend
- Stack: Java, Ruby on Rails, React, TS, MySQL, AWS
Twitter — Senior Software Engineer
JAN 2013 - FEB 2016
- Search Quality Team — relevance improvements
- Language Engineering — language id, tokenization, phrase extraction
- twitter-korean-text (open source)
- Stack: Scala, Java, Lucene, RoR, JS, MySQL
Indeed — Software Engineer Intern
Summer 2012
- Elasticsearch, data aggregation
- Job posting crawler & ingestion
Infochimps — Big Data Engineer Intern
Summer 2011
- Automatic data curation (SVM), Elasticsearch
- Voronoi data generation; EMR, Hadoop
Major Career Projects
- Airbnb Transportation System (2020) — Designed overall architecture; built two Java backend services; contributed to React-TS frontend
- Airbnb Payout System V2 (2017-2019) — Rebuilt legacy Ruby to modern Java; processed hundreds of thousands tx/day; achieved >99.999% success rate
- Airbnb Resolution Center (2016) — Designed & delivered entire backend
- Twitter Search Improvements (2015) — Relevance improvements on Search product
- Twitter Language Processing Library (2014) — Led 5 engineers; language id, tokenization, phrase extraction
- twitter-korean-text (2013) — Korean NLP engine; open-sourced in 2014
Side Projects
- Silicon Valley Illustrated — Team blog since 2017 — link
- open-korean-text — Industry-grade Korean text processor (Scala) — openkoreantext.org
- REACTION Project (2010-2012) — Social network big data; Portugal International Laboratory grant
Education
UT Austin — Ph.D. (pursued)
2010 - 2012 · IR, Crowdsourcing, NLP (School of Information)
Univ. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee — MLIS
2009 - 2010 · School of Information Studies
Yonsei Univ. — MLIS
2008 - 2010 · School of Humanities
Yonsei Univ. — BA (English, Library & Info Sci)
2004 - 2008 · School of Humanities
Awards
- Twitter #hackweek — Core Value Award (Q3 2013)
- Twitter #hackweek — Most Popular Project (Q2 2013)
- Challenge Award
- Highly Commended Paper — Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction (2012)
Publications
Books
- Semiconductor Sovereignty — 2024 (translator)
- AI, the war of Gods — 2024
- OXO Playbook — 2023
- Self-motivated Professionals Make the Best Company — 2019
- Silicon Valley Illustrated — 2018
Select Papers
- Twitter and Elections around the World — iConference 2015
- Integrating MeSH thesaurus into health IR — IP&M 2014
- Generating automatic keywords for ASR transcripts — ENRICH 2013
- Finding and exploring memes on social media — HT 2012
- Facet view for biomedical IR — JBI 2011
- Crowdworker filtering with SVM — ASIS&T 2011
- Search strategies on new health IR system — Online Info Review 2010