LG AI Research Recruits Distinguished Scholars in Succession

AI specialists Professors Seo Jung-yun and Lee Moon-tae

200 billion won investment; 1,000 specialists to be cultivated

LG AI Research, which caused a considerable stir in the industry last December by unveiling EXAONE — the hyperscale artificial intelligence (AI) with the finest learning ability in Korea — has embarked on an all-round recruitment of distinguished scholars. Having recruited Professor Honglak Lee of the University of Michigan, counted among the world's top ten AI scholars, at the institute's launch in 2020, it has now selected as core talent two AI specialists in a teacher–student relationship: Professor Seo Jung-yun of Sogang University (66) and Professor Lee Moon-tae of the University of Illinois (40). According to industry sources on the 10th, LG AI Research recently appointed Professor Seo — an early pioneer of natural language processing (NLP) recognized as Korea's foremost scholar in the field — as chair of its talent development committee. Professor Seo has published 403 papers on natural language processing alone. He chairs the Smart Digital Research Council of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea and serves as co-representative of the Korea Federation of Information Science Education. Having cultivated AI specialists over many years, Professor Seo will support the identification and development of talent at LG AI Research. LG AI Research plans to invest 200 billion won in securing talent worldwide and in AI research and development by next year, with the goal of cultivating 1,000 specialists within the LG Group.

Professor Lee Moon-tae, who joined LG AI Research earlier this year, is an AI specialist with a master's in computer science from Stanford University and a doctorate in computer science from Cornell University. His main research areas are machine learning and natural language processing, and he is an emerging researcher who has published numerous papers at the world's most prestigious AI conferences, including NeurIPS and ICML. He currently leads research at LG AI Research on advanced hyperscale AI technology and the future direction of machine learning. Professor Seo was Professor Lee's undergraduate supervisor. The two will bring synergy to bear on research into AI ethics issues such as the use of EXAONE's language model and data bias. LG AI Research, which had some 70 staff at launch, grew rapidly to some 190 within a year. [Reporter Lee Seung-hoon]

Maeil Business Newspaper article: https://www.mk.co.kr/news/business/view/2022/03/226010/