Graduate Department of Artificial Intelligence, Sogang University

Grand Prize Won at the 2022 ETRI Human Understanding AI Paper Competition

- Awarded the Minister of Science and ICT Prize and 5 million won in prize money -

▲ (Clockwise from left) Lee Yun-keun, Director of the AI Research Laboratory at ETRI; Lee Ji-hyun, Yeon Hee-yeon and Bang Na-mo (all master's students, Graduate Department of Artificial Intelligence, class of '22); Professor Koo Myoung-wan, Department of Computer Science & Engineering and Graduate Department of Artificial Intelligence

The research team (Team Sogang-ISDS) of Professor Koo Myoung-wan of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (and the Graduate Department of Artificial Intelligence) won the Grand Prize — equivalent to the Minister of Science and ICT Prize — at the 2022 ETRI Human Understanding AI Paper Competition held in Seogwipo, Jeju Island, on 30 June 2022.

The team, composed of master's students in Sogang University's Graduate Department of Artificial Intelligence (Bang Na-mo, Yeon Hee-yeon and Lee Ji-hyun), received the Minister of Science and ICT Prize together with 5 million won in prize money for a paper titled 'Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation Using an MLP-Mixer Architecture'. The winning paper was also published in the proceedings of the 2022 Korea Computer Congress (KCC 2022), hosted by the Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers.

The team was the first to propose a method of applying the 'MLP-Mixer' architecture to solving emotion recognition problems using multimodal data in which speech and text are interwoven.

The 'MMM (Multi-modal MLP Mixer)' architecture proposed by the team combines, via an MLP-mixer, the features of speech data and text data extracted using the speech pre-training model Wav2vec 2.0 and the Korean pre-trained language model KcELECTRA, and classifies the final emotion expressed in the speech and text.

The competition, hosted by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), invited submissions of research results in AI technology capable of interacting with people. Winners were determined through a second round of presentation assessments open only to those who passed the first round of paper submissions, held from 16 March to 22 April. At the second-round presentation assessment held on the 30th of last month as part of the KCC 2022 programme, a total of seven teams competed, including Professor Koo's team.

Sogang University's Graduate Department of Artificial Intelligence admitted its first cohort of 19 students in spring 2022. The master's students who won this award receive full scholarships from Smilegate Co., Ltd., and are convergence-oriented students who majored in the humanities as undergraduates but are now studying artificial intelligence at graduate level. Sogang University plans to open an undergraduate Department of Artificial Intelligence in 2023.

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