Hong-Kyun Bae

Assistant Professor

Hello, I’m Hong-Kyun Bae, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Kookmin University. I earned my B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Inha University. In 2023, I had the opportunity to be a visiting scholar at Pennsylvania State University. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Hanyang University in 2024 under the guidance of Professor Sang-Wook Kim. My research focuses on Recommender Systems, Data Mining, and Artificial Intelligence.

If you are interested in collaborating with me, please visit here.

Work Experience

Kookmin University

Mar. 2025 -

Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science

Hanyang University

Sep. 2024 - Feb. 2025

Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer Science (PI: Prof. Sang-Wook Kim)

Penn State

Sep. 2023 - Nov. 2023

Visiting Researcher at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (PI: Prof. Dongwon Lee)

Education

Hanyang University

Sep. 2016 - Aug. 2024

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science

  • Big Data Science Lab (Advisor: Prof. Sang-Wook Kim)

  • Thesis: Understanding Domain Characteristics for Effective Learning-to-Rank (LTR) Approaches in Recommender Systems (Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award)

Inha University

Mar. 2009 - Aug. 2016

  • B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering

Selected Publications

International Conferences

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Hae-Ri Jang, Won-Yong Shin, and Sang-Wook Kim. “Ranking Items by the Current-Preferences and Profits: A List-wise Learning-to-Rank Approach to Profit Maximization.” ACM WWW (BK21 Top Conference, IF: 4), 2025.

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Yebeen Kim, Hyunjoon Kim, and Sang-Wook Kim. “Negative Sampling in Next-POI Recommendations: Observation, Approach, and Evaluation.” ACM WWW (BK21 Top Conference, IF: 4), 2024.

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Hae-Ri Jang, Yang-Sae Moon, and Sang-Wook Kim. “Item-Ranking Promotion in Recommender Systems.” ACM WWW (Short), 2024.

  • Jeewon Ahn, Hong-Kyun Bae, and Sang-Wook Kim. “Is the ‘Impression Log’ Beneficial to Evaluating News Recommender Systems? No, it is Not!.” ACM WWW (Short), 2024.

  • Jeewon Ahn, Hong-Kyun Bae, and Sang-Wook Kim. “Is the Impression Log Beneficial to Effective Model Training in News Recommender Systems? No, It’s NOT.” ACM WWW (Short), 2023.

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Yeon-Chang Lee, Kyungsik Han, and Sang-Wook Kim. “A Competition-Aware Approach to Accurate TV Show Recommendation.” IEEE ICDE (BK21 Top Conference, IF: 3), 2023.

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Jeewon Ahn, Dongwon Lee, and Sang-Wook Kim. “LANCER: A Lifetime-Aware News Recommender System.” AAAI (BK21 Top Conference, IF: 4), 2023.

  • Sung-Jun Park, Dong-Kyu Chae, Hong-Kyun Bae, Sumin Park, and Sang-Wook Kim. “Reinforcement Learning over Sentiment-Augmented Knowledge Graphs towards Accurate and Explainable Recommendation.” ACM WSDM (BK21 Top Conference, IF: 3), 2022.

  • Yunyong Ko, Jae-Seo Yu, Hong-Kyun Bae, Yongjun Park, Dongwon Lee, and Sang-Wook Kim. “MASCOT: A Quantization Framework for Efficient Matrix Factorization in Recommender Systems.” IEEE ICDM (BK21 Top Conference, IF: 3), 2021.

International SCIE Journals

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Jiyeon Kim, Jongwuk Lee, and Sang-Wook Kim. “DUET: Dually Guided Knowledge Distillation from Explicit Feedback.” Information Fusion (JCR 2023 IF: 14.8 (Top 1%)), 2025.

  • Hong-Kyun Bae, Hyung-Ook Kim, Won-Yong Shin, and Sang-Wook Kim. “How to Get Consensus with Neighbors?: Rating Standardization for Accurate Collaborative Filtering.” Knowledge-Based Systems (JCR 2023 IF: 7.2 (Top 15%)), 2021.

Professional Services

Program Committee Member

  • The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025.

  • The 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), 2025.

  • The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC), 2025.

Conference Reviewer

  • International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2024.

  • ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2024.

  • ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC), 2024.

  • IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2023–2024.

Journal Reviewer

  • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 2024.