Jihye (Jessica) Kim
My research is in AI safety and alignment, with a focus on LLM agents—approached through the lens of causal inference and econometrics.
I hold a Ph.D. in Information Systems from KAIST and have published in Information Systems Research (UTD24/FT50)—one of the most selective journals in Information Systems. I am currently a graduate student in NLP at UC Santa Cruz (Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering), researching deceptive behaviors in LLM agents and developing benchmarks for AI safety and alignment—including mental health applications and enterprise multi-agent systems.
Before graduate school, I worked for three years as a Senior Consultant at Deloitte Consulting, gaining hands-on experience across diverse industries and business domains.
News
Recent updates
- May 2026 NLP MIRAGE paper accepted at ICML 2026 Workshop on Agentic AI (AIWILD).
- Apr 2026 NLP Single-authored paper on LLM negotiation agents accepted at TrustNLP at ACL 2026.
- 2026 Causal First-author paper published in Information Systems Research (UTD24/FT50).
- 2026 NLP Multi-Turn RAG paper accepted at SemEval at ACL 2026.
Research
AI Alignment & Agentic AI
I study how LLM agents fail to remain aligned—and build interventions and benchmarks to close those gaps. My current projects include deceptive manipulation in negotiation agents, detecting covert data exfiltration in LLM agents, LLM robustness under social pressure, and benchmark development for mental health applications and enterprise multi-agent systems.
Causal Inference & Econometrics (IS)
I study the causal effects of technology-enabled interventions on individual economic behavior and market outcomes—examining how digital financial tools affect savings behavior among low-wage workers, how self-service technology reshapes consumer demand variety, and how platform governance decisions alter competitive dynamics. I employ quasi-experimental identification strategies on large-scale panel data: staggered difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, and double machine learning, validated through randomized experiments.
Publications
Selected papers (* = first author)
Press Coverage
Selected media on my research
Dive
Instant pay can boost low-income workers’ savings habits, report finds
Coverage of ISR paper on how on-demand wage access improves financial engagement among low-wage workers.
FORMS
Study Finds That On-Demand Wage Access Boosts Savings and Financial Engagement for Low-Wage Workers
Official INFORMS press release highlighting findings from the Information Systems Research publication.
CV
Education, experience, and skills