Nick Oh

Hi there! I’m Nick (Seungheon) Oh – a researcher experimenting at the intersection between every field that ever studied “thinking” and every machine that’s trying to “think”.

Basically I’m interested in two experiments: whether fields that explained humans can improve machines (not just performance, but how they collaborate with us); and whether machines can test human theories at impossible scales.

After studying Politics and Economics at LSE, I worked as a Junior NLP Engineer at a London based hedge fund while sketching out socialscience.ai – a side project to bring ML models to social scientists. But building it revealed the more interesting question was the reverse. Instead of AI/ML serving social science, what if the disciplines that studied humans could advance machine intelligence? That flip became socius labs, now an independent research lab supported by LSE and LSE Generate exploring this convergence.

I am currently informally advised by Professor Fernand Gobet, collaborating on bridging cognitive science and machine intelligence.

Current research explores whether metacognitive monitoring is a fundamental functional requirement for intelligence, and whether XAI can generate epistemically legitimate knowledge despite its imperfect fidelity. Increasingly, I’m drawn to using neural networks of varying scales and architectures — from RNNs to LLMs — as cognitive models to better understand the computational principles underlying humans. I’m also interested in whether we can measure and operationalise metacognitive functions and subjective “feelings” in machines.