Technology changes quickly, and we must keep pace with it in a timely way. However, whatever technologies emerge, the timeless question we ultimately pursue stays the same:

How do humans develop through their interactions with technology?

I study human–information interaction for human development from a process-oriented perspective. I believe in the value of an old saying: “the process is the outcome.” We now live in an age when technology lets us produce results easily and quickly, with far less effort. I remain focused on how people think on the way to those results. Reading information piece by piece, reflecting on it deeply, developing ideas, and continually forming new questions are, I believe, vital to developing our capacity to think and to our intellectual growth.

To borrow a concept from philosophy to express what I ultimately pursue: whatever technologies may come, I hope that the ways people interact with information through them can help people pursue eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία)—also the core theme of my qualifying paper. In Aristotelian ethics, eudaimonia refers to human flourishing or living well and represents the highest human good, something worth pursuing in itself. It describes a life in which people develop and exercise their capacities and virtues well.

Future Research Agenda

My future research pursues an understanding of how increasingly capable information technologies support or hinder our development as thinkers, from their immediate effects on individual interactions to their longer-term effects on information and societal environments. I also want to pursue empirical research that guides the design of systems to better align with human values, and support our intellectual growth.

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Cultivating Creative and Curious Minds in a World of Instant Answers

How can we sustain curiosity and creative inquiry as AI reduces the effort required to produce answers and ideas?

Cultivating the ability to ask good questions
Incubation and the beauty of pauses

Pursuing Intellectual Joy and Habits of Mind

How can we sustain the joy of thinking and develop lasting habits of mind while making the most of AI?

Desirable difficult work
Enacting AI literacy, from knowing to doing
Habits of mind

Human Values in AI Design and Adoption

How can human values be identified, negotiated, and enacted in the design and adoption of AI and emerging information systems?

Beyond immediate user preferences
Aligning AI systems with human values
Values in practice

Beyond Generation: Becoming

How do people and AI influence one another over time, and what does it mean to develop as a human in a world of generative AI?

Generation versus becoming: Generative AI is built for generation, producing outcomes. In philosophy, becoming is less about making something than about coming to be someone new.
Cultivating what lies beyond generation

These are only glimpses. I’d love to share the fuller picture during job market interviews or in-person conversations. Feel free to ask me anything or share your thoughts.

My Research So Far

From books and libraries to the web, and now to AI, the primary ways we engage with information have shifted, and my research has grown with them. Across these shifts, I examine how people generate ideas, develop interests, and form questions, and how these processes relate to creative thinking, interest development, and epistemic curiosity. I also study human agency and intellectual ownership, in connection with the intellectual capacities that new technologies call for.

As an avid reader who chose library and information science as my undergraduate major, I still count libraries as my first love: my attention grew from books to libraries as a third place, to the people in them, and finally to values, asking what values people pursue in libraries and what values libraries pursue for them.

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Creative thinking

Can web search help us think creatively, not just find information? Because new ideas build on existing information, this line of research examines how people generate and develop ideas as they search for, organize, and synthesize information, and it designs and evaluates creativity-support search systems. By comparing these experimental tools with baseline tools that offer minimal support, the work also informs which parts of creative thinking AI could support.

Publications

Choi, Y., Chavula, C., Yi, S., Guan, Z., & Rieh, S. Y. (in preparation). Guiding idea generation: Designing and evaluating creativity support search tools. To be submitted to Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology in November 2026.
Choi, Y., Rieh, S. Y., Chavula, C., & Yi, S. (2025). Think creatively outside the search box: Divergent and convergent thinking using creativity support search tools. In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 138–149.
Chavula, C., Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2024). Searching for creativity: How people search to generate new ideas. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(4), 438–453.
Chavula, C., Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2023). SearchIdea: An idea generation tool to support creativity in academic search. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’23), 161–171. Best Paper Award
Chavula, C., Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2022). Understanding creative thinking processes in searching for new ideas. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’22), 321–326.

Interest development

What keeps people thinking and exploring when there is no predetermined goal? Through a week-long audio diary study, I introduced the concept of interest-driven search and the five-phase AI-Mediated Interest-Driven Search (AIM-IDS) model, which explains how interest develops through AI-mediated information seeking. The findings show that AI features that lower barriers to initial inquiry may also hinder sustained engagement as interests deepen.

Publications

Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (in preparation). How interests emerge and deepen: Exploring human–AI interaction in interest-driven search. To be submitted to Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology in February 2027.
Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2026). Interest-driven search in AI-mediated information environments: An audio diary study. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’26) (pp. 453–457). Best Short Paper Award

Epistemic curiosity & question-asking interaction

What if AI asked the questions? My dissertation designs and evaluates a Question-Asking AI that reverses the usual pattern of “humans ask, AI answers” to “AI asks, humans respond and ask back.” A longitudinal study examines how this interaction shapes people’s epistemic curiosity, question-asking, and engagement with information over time.

Publications

Choi, Y. (forthcoming, November 2026). When AI asks questions: Question-asking AI to foster epistemic curiosity in human information interaction. 89th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T ’26), Bangkok, Thailand. Doctoral Colloquium
Choi, Y. (2026). Designing a question-asking AI to cultivate epistemic curiosity in information seeking. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’26) (pp. 409–413), Seattle, WA, United States. Doctoral Consortium
Choi, Y. (2025). Answering back information behavior in human–AI interaction. SIG-USE Symposium on Information Behavior Research and Practice in the Age of Human-Centered AI, 88th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T ’25), Washington, DC, United States. Workshop presentation

Human agency & intellectual ownership

How does dividing intellectual work between humans and AI affect creativity, cognitive effort, and ownership? With Research Guru, an agentic AI system for scientific idea generation, we found that when AI reduced the effort of generating ideas, researchers often spent more effort evaluating and verifying the results, and their sense of ownership depended on how they understood their own contributions. My team is developing the concept of desirable difficult work: effortful intellectual activities worth preserving because they build expertise.

Publications

Liu, H.^†, Choi, Y.^†, Gautam, S., Jaffe, G., Rieh, S. Y., & Lease, M. (under revision). Who owns creativity and who does the work? Trade-offs in LLM-supported research ideation. Manuscript submitted to International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Preprint
Gautam, S., Liu, H., Choi, Y., & Lease, M. (2026). Accountability, transparency, and trust in AI-mediated scientific research. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 1494–1512.
Liu, H.^†, Choi, Y.^†, Gautam, S., Jaffe, G., Rieh, S. Y., & Lease, M. (2026). Effects of varying control vs. automation in human-in-the-loop research ideation. Amazon Research Day 2026 Workshop on “AI Co-Scientist: Accelerating Scientific Discovery through Intelligent AI Collaboration,” Palo Alto, CA, United States. Workshop presentation

^† Equal contribution (co-first authors)

Values of libraries and their future with AI

What values do people pursue in libraries, and what values do libraries pursue for them? Drawing on Means–End Chain theory, I found that older adults’ public library use was tied to mental health, self-satisfaction, everyday vitality, and a sense of connection to the wider community. Through two IMLS-funded projects, I now ask what values should guide libraries and librarianship as AI transforms how people seek, access, and evaluate information.

Publications

Choi, Y., Rieh, S. Y., Guan, Z., Choate, A., Day, J., Fleischmann, K., Lankes, R. D., & Li, T. (in press). Integrating expertise in the age of AI: College students’ views on human and AI-generated reference responses. In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2026).
Bilal, D., Chu, C., Rieh, S. Y., & Choi, Y. (2025). Bridging the AI education, knowledge, and skills gap of library and information professionals: Evaluation of the Innovation, Inquiry, Disruption, and Access (IDEA) Institute on Artificial Intelligence. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 66(4), 340–362.
Rieh, S. Y., Choi, Y., Guan, Z., Triem, H., & Xu, H. (2025). Training future LIS faculty in AI and data science through a library rotation education model. In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 1277–1280. Panel
Choi, Y., Rieh, S. Y., Choate, A., Day, J., Fleischmann, K. R., Lankes, D., & Li, T. (2023). College students’ perceptions of virtual reference responses and generative AI answers. Workshop: LIS Perspectives on AI and Designing Human-Centred AI for LIS, 86th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T ’23), London, United Kingdom. Workshop presentation
Choi, Y., & Cha, M. (2019). A study on the elderly people’s value system of the public library use: Focusing on public libraries in Seoul. Journal of the Korean Biblia Society for Library and Information Science, 30(1), 121–143.
Choi, Y., & Cha, M. (2018). A study on the contracting out of public libraries in Japan by Japanese bookstore company: Focusing on content analysis of newspaper articles related to the “Takeo City Library”. Journal of the Korean Biblia Society for Library and Information Science, 29(4), 247–274.