Each year, cognitive science faculty members nominate a graduating cognitive science major with the strongest combination of academic excellence, sustained and outstanding involvement in research, significant contribution to the undergraduate environment of the JHU Cognitive Science Department, and involvement in increasing awareness of cognitive science at JHU and beyond.
This year, we name Woo Jin Choi as our 2024 Glushko Outstanding Undergraduate Cognitive Scientist! Woo Jin will give a talk on Wednesday, May 22 at 12:30 pm on “Questions Under (natural) Discussion.”
Woo Jin Choi, a double major in Cognitive Science and Computer Science, has an outstanding record of achievement in coursework, research and contributions to the undergraduate program. Since his junior year he has participated in research in both departments. In Dr. Kyle Rawlins‘ semantics lab, Woo Jin has been involved in an ongoing project that aims to annotate naturalistic linguistic data with pragmatic information about implicit questions agents might have been addressing during communication; in addition to contributions to the larger project he has taken the lead on an effort to extend the annotation protocol to Korean conversational speech. This project promises to break new ground in computational models of how humans encode meaning.
In Dr. Ben Van Durme‘s research lab in Computer Science, Woo Jin has participated in a project that uses large language models to annotate text with evidential support, making contributions especially to the annotation interface. Throughout both of these projects he has shown a deep appreciation for the integration of theory in Cognitive Science and Linguistics with computational modeling and contemporary AI.
Woo Jin has received stellar grades in his courses, and has been on the dean’s list nearly every semester, taking a challenging mix of Cognitive Science and Computer Science courses throughout. He has contributed to increasing appreciation of cognitive science by serving as treasurer of the undergraduate Cognitive Science Honors Society Omega Psi since 2021. In Fall 2024 he enters the PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Rochester, and we are excited to see the next stages of his career!