Ryan SangBaek Kim
Founder & Principal Investigator
Ryan Research Institute
Affective AI · Emotion AI Governance · Philosophy of Mind · AI Ethics
Paris, France
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2751-496X
Email: ryan@ryanresearch.org
Substack: https://substack.com/@profryankim
About the Institute
Ryan Research Institute (RRI) is a Paris-based research institute studying emotion, interpretation, and the ethics of affective AI.
Its central focus is interpretive authority: who retains the final authority to define what a feeling means when emotion is measured, named, inferred, scored, or governed by AI systems and institutions.
RRI develops Affective Sovereignty as a research program for emotion AI governance, human-AI interaction, narrative–affect geometry, and the philosophy of affective inference.
The institute publishes peer-reviewed articles, datasets, books, visual research materials, and public writing across academic and public-facing contexts.
Professional Memberships and Public Profiles
(ordered by relevance & recency)
- Full Member, International Association for Safe & Ethical AI (IASEAI)
- Full Member, Italian Society for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (SIpEIA)
- Full Member, BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT (UK)
- Full Member, SGAI – Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (BCS AI Section)
- Full Member, EurAI – European Association for Artificial Intelligence (via BCS)
- Full Member, Korean Artificial Intelligence Association (KAIA)
- Lifetime Member, Korean Academic Society of Business Administration (KASBA)
- Registered Artist, Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA)
- Lifetime Member, Korean Artist Welfare Foundation (KAWF)
“The question is not only whether AI reads emotion accurately, but who gains authority from that reading.”
Research Position
RRI begins from a simple claim: emotional life is not only felt. It is interpreted under conditions of power.
As emotion-aware AI systems become capable of labeling, predicting, ranking, and responding to affect, the central risk is not limited to misclassification. The deeper risk is the transfer of interpretive authority: systems begin to make emotional meaning operational before the person has named, revised, refused, or contested that meaning.
Affective Sovereignty is the principle that interpretation should not be fully delegated. AI systems may support reflection, care, education, and decision-making, but they should not structurally outrank the person as the final interpreter of their own emotional life.
This is a psychological, ethical, and governance problem. It concerns dignity, autonomy, contestability, and the design of institutions that act on emotional inference.
Research Collaboration
RRI supports a small number of scope-defined research collaborations focused on validation, reproducibility, conceptual integration, and manuscript development.
These are not training programs, open-ended mentorships, or general supervision arrangements. Collaborations are document-driven, limited in scope, and based on clear contribution tracking and research governance.
RRI is not currently accepting general student supervision requests or unfocused collaboration proposals.
For research or institutional inquiries: