Observatory

• Built the professional-track coaching for mentoring platform end-to-end: a 9-step AI diagnostic, a free-consult + Career Compass hybrid, and a 12-month data-retention policy into Terms/Privacy.
• Turned the capstone into portfolio: shipped the Smart Budgeting case study (override interaction, AI-boundary framing) alongside the final presentation to UW ORIS stakeholders.
• Shipped a personal side product, Worklish — a browser extension turning YouTube videos into work insights + English-learning flashcards saved to phone wallpaper

• AI governance & safety was the month's spine: AiGovOps Founders Forum, an HKS-alumni webinar on governing AI through innovation/risk/responsibility, 'Building Safe AI Communities' (T&S, policy enforcement, cross-cultural moderation)
• AI creation & dev tools: Zara Zhang on code as a storytelling medium, and the Changbal Product group's 'AI Powered Creator.' to learn about AI use in content creation

• A coffee chat with AI engineer building production GenAI/ML systems, to learn about his use of AI in fintech industry.
• A coffee chat with the CEO of AI SOC platform startup, learned about AIDR ecosystem and how AI could help reducing alert fatigues while improving the productivity.
• Capstone team in HCDE, UW (ORBIT!!): We closed out the final presentation together!!

• Alaska to Anchorage & Seward while my family was visiting. Beautiful Glaciers, and wildlife animals.
• Snoqualmie Falls. Seemed like mini Niagara Falls. I love nature.

June was a month of series of events: Capstone Showcase, Graduation, World Cup and my Birthday :) It was a great time to retrospect times spent with my family and friends. My times in UW has wrapped up, but my journey is still continuing!

• Drove a mentoring platform build by unifying user dashboards under the shared design system, creating email notification templates, and reminder logic.
• Shipped a personal cafe-discovery product end-to-end: editorial card system, score-based ranking, map-to-list hover sync, a crowdedness signal, and admin verification. Caught and fixed an $80 runaway API bill (lesson: always check how the API is actually being called).
• Learned agentic-UI systems at the Generative UI Global Hackathon: canvas dashboards and agentic frontend components.
• Productized a marketing-content AI agent with a multi-LLM evaluation framework scoring content quality and safety; added WhatsApp and X channels with a feedback loop (cut a manual workflow roughly 83%).
• Advanced Capstone usability research: mid-fi prototype, user interviews with GMs, and AI prototyping used to compress the design loop and reallocate the team toward communication.
• Architected a personal coaching and operating system with newsletter-triage and weekly-logging workflows.

• How future of AI-agent native product interface can be designed with generative UI that is customizable, personalizable components based on the context. Currently, only the content is changing, but what if the whole experience with the interface changes depending on the user context?
• People who can question and leverage AI will be more competent than ever and exponential growth is coming. The talk from Possible Finance's CTO raised an insight on people becoming code reviewers rather than coders. When everyone can build and create code files, the 'taste' and 'adaptability' matters.
• Laura Forlano's UW HCDE Distinguished Lecture provided my deep inner belief that technology and society are intertwined and reciprocal. That is why I'm determined to design technology that is responsible.

• Mentor coffee chat, the month's most meaningful conversation; honest feedback on maturing products toward monetization and engagement.
• Purple Pita friends with drawing time!

• Mt. Rainier — first trip; easy trail, quiet.

May was the month AI-native capability stopped feeling aspirational and started feeling true. The first weeks on the Max plan opened a multi-terminal, multi-project workflow, and I felt myself becoming genuinely capable, sharing tool workflows with friends and mentor. By mid-month the ambition sharpened into wanting to be irreplaceable and non-ignorant; by month-end I had reworked my room for focus and the discipline followed.

• Claude Code Max plan subscribed.. Let’s see how I can push forward even more!

• Starting to build this portfolio website!

• Climbing with belay! On Belay! Take!

• NLP and Korean Language; we should have more Korean datasets to improve the quality of LLM models.

• Agents are not features!

• Global Security Tour at Bellevue; met a bunch of people in the cybersecurity domains, who were passionate about the ‘safety’.

• Career Paths for Women in Cybersecurity; we cannot discuss about AI with cybersecurity, compliance, and risk.

• Market to Table Cooking Experience; unintentionally(?) met lots of lawyers who were at the edge of IP, regulations, AI, etc..

• Seattle Asian Art Museum and Voluntary Park. How come I didn’t get to visit this serene place?

• Seward Park

• Lake Serene; one of the top 3 difficult hikes I’ve ever done….

I have to be honest…. I was going through low moments during April, getting lost and feeling FOMO of where I was going. But I realized that it is just a learning process.

I permit myself to feel this way. Nobody has the answer. All I have to do is just take actions!

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• Amazon Nova Hackathon! Couldn’t win but learned a lot :)

• How would blind or low vision people better solve math problems with screen readers? → Co-designed and built a prototype.

• ACM SIGIR (Information Retrieval); Agentic AI and Information Correlation

• From document retrieval to “Goal-directed problem solving” - Information retrieval is no more finding information but to help attain the goals!

• 1:1 Coffee chats with old and new friends :)

• My bestie visited Seattle to see me!

• Leavenworth

• Gas Works Park with beautiful sunsets!

Plant the seeds that later yield fruits in the future.

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• Laser cutting and Arduino sensor work for Physical Prototyping class!

• Digital Authentication Presentation for Accessibility and Inclusive Design class. Recognized for the best presentation :)

• Stylemax created!! → Applying for Amazon AI Hackathon.

• How to create design systems to AI coded products. How to refactor the new design systems to the existing codebase?

• Superbowl football rules. And Seahawk won!!

• Seattle Research Community Q1 meetup; met local UX Researchers in Seattle and learned how they use AI for better research works.

• Trust and Safety Community meetup at Fremont

• Green Lake walking; the perks of living nearby the lake

• Don’t take permission from your past to build your future.

• What would it take to do this well?

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• Built PKNIC mentoring platform; ideated the wireframes, defined the metrics with cursor, Claude.

• Built marketing content agent for PKNIC content optimization for 4 social media channels.

• Starting to work as a team of 4, with a sponsor UW Office of Research Information Services (ORIS) to automate their research award setup workflow!

• How to create skills.md to build robust and high quality AI outputs.

• 1:1 coffee chat to talk about Responsible AI and the infrastructure sustainability.

• OpenAI Forum WA Chapter (Seattle) Inaugural Meetup - met amazing people at the frontier of building AI!

• Henry Art Museum; A collective listening session, where all the people were listening to subtle audio in the auditorium. My auditorial sensor expanded.

• Question is a way to reach the goal.

• Observe my emotions as they are. Don’t judge over them.

• “Prefer”. Let yourself detach with the condition.

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