Events

Intent-Aware AI: From Screens to the Physical World

Speaker: Juheon Choi

Location: 1 MetroTech Center, Room 22nd floor

Date: Monday, August 3, 2026

Abstract: As AI becomes part of everyday life, two capabilities grow increasingly important: understanding what a person actually intends, and supporting forms of interaction that go beyond the chat interface. If users must spell out exactly what they want every single time, the range of tasks AI can meaningfully support stays narrow. This talk presents research from two directions, HCI and Robot Learning, on the value AI can create by inferring and acting on human intent. The first is an agent system that helps users keep their digital device use aligned with the intentions they have set for themselves. The second is a robot system that reads intent from nonverbal signals such as gaze and gesture, not language alone, and acts accordingly. Both lines of work ask the same question: how do we obtain human intent, and what can we do with it once we have it?

Bio: Juheon Choi is a Master's student at the KAIST Graduate School of AI, advised by Professor Kimin Lee, working at the intersection of Physical AI and HCI. He brings eight years of industry experience: he was a founding member of Polariant, a polarization-based indoor positioning startup acquired by SOCAR, where he architected an IoT fleet management system for 20,000 connected vehicles, and later served as a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), designing cloud architectures for IoT and robotics at high-tech enterprises.

Dinner at 6 PM. Talk at 7 PM. You must RSVP to attend in-person or receive the Zoom link.  Please contact global-ai-frontier-lab@nyu.edu with any questions.