Ilmi Yoon

Bio

Dr. Ilmi Yoon is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at San Francisco State University. Her research interests lie in promoting inclusivity and accessibility, utilizing machine learning and Human-centered AI. Furthermore, her research intersects innovative technology and societal benefits, specifically for enhancing digital access in video accessibility for visually impaired users by enabling descriptive audio description generations to online videos. While automatizing the video caption generation for YouTube videos for visually impaired users is a challenging task, her students and collaborators are making steady progress on narrationBot (baseline description generation), infoBot (on-demand visual Q&A), and VICR (Validated Image Caption Rator) on a YouDescribeX platform as well as supporting the live site of YouDescribe website and mobile applications. Throughout these development processes, she honed the expertise in video captioning issues such as datasets, models, and evaluations (YouDescribe, We archive dataset for video captioning for ML training, Validated image caption rating dataset for caption quality control, Fine-tuning Large Pre-trained Vision-Language Models, Human-in-the-loop to validate AI captions. etc). She is also passionate about teaching/mentoring students to success. She leads/co-leads multiple impactful projects for computer science education and inclusive computing such as NSF IUSE for  computing application minor degree, DS and ML for Biotechnology certificate degrees, high school CS education, BPC-Alliance on socially responsible computing and inclusive computing programs. These initiatives reflect her passion and ability to manage large-scale, impactful projects for students’ success. Furthermore, they also demonstrate her unwavering commitment to making computing accessible and beneficial to a broad spectrum of society.