Jinkyu Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University. Prior to his academic appointment, he served as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly Google’s self-driving car project), where he led advanced research initiatives in autonomous driving, particularly addressing critical challenges in planning and behavior prediction. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Professor John (the edge) Canny. During his doctoral studies, he was affiliated with the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab and the Berkeley DeepDrive (BDD) project. His research focused on developing explainable and advisory models—systems capable of articulating their decision-making rationale, delineating their strengths and limitations, and providing insights into their anticipated behaviors. His current research interests include: (1) Multi-modal representation learning across image, text, and sound, (2) Scalable machine learning for autonomous vehicles, (3) Continual and life-long learning, and (4) Foundation models.

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