Robot engineer Dennis Hong, Authority on AI Bohyung Han to give advice
Doctor Soonmin Bae, born in the 1980s, recruited as AI2XL Director

From left: UCLA Prof. Dennis Hong, SNU Prof. Bohyung Han, AI2XL Director Soonmin Bae

KT, which is pursuing a transformation from a mobile telecommunications company to a digital platform business, is spurring on the reinforcement of its AI technology by recruiting talents in the field of AI and robotics.

KT announced on the 25th that it recruited UCLA Professor Dennis Hong, a robot engineer, and SNU Professor Bohyung Han, an authority in the field of AI, as advisors. In addition, Doctor Soomin Bae, who has conducted research on robots and AI at Samsung Techwin and Naver, was scouted as the director of AI2XL (AI to Everything Lab) newly created within the KT Institute of Convergence Technology.

Professor Dennis Hong had his name listed in Popular Science’s ‘the Brilliant 10’, which honors top scientists younger than 40 years of age. He worked at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was a professor in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. He later served as the director of robotics research at RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms & Laboratory), a robotics institute under UCLA is currently the director of robotics and mechanisms research at UCLA RoMeLa.

In 2015, Professor Bohyung Han won first place in the object tracking algorithm competition VOT (Visual Object Tracking) Challenge of ICCV (the International Conference on Computer Vision), an international conference on AI pattern recognition. He was awarded the Google AI Focused Research Award in 2018. He is to give advice on the direction of technology development that resolves AI’s social and ethical issues along with advice on up-to-date R&D and deep learning research at KT.

Senior Vice President Soonmin Bae, who has become the only executive to be born in the 1980s with this recruitment, graduated from the School of Computing at Korea Advanced Institute of Science, and received a master’s and doctorate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has since conducted research on robot and avatar artificial intelligence in Samsung Techwin and Naver and will now take the lead of KT’s overall AI strategy as the director of AI2XL.

Source: http://ee.snu.ac.kr/community/news?bm=v&bbsidx=50924

Translated by: Jee Hyun Lee, English Editor of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, jlee621@snu.ac.kr