41-year-old doctor was seated at the AI ​​research command tower…

KT CEO Sang-mo Lee greetings at the initiation ceremony for the 2nd’Future Talent Development Project’ for the development of in-house AI·DX talents conducted on-contact. [사진 KT]

KT, which declared a transformation from a telecommunications company to a digital platform company (‘Digico’, Digico), has recruited a large number of talents in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, it attracts attention by recruiting doctors in their early 40s to the newly established AI Research Command Tower. It is interpreted as a selected person reflecting the will of KT CEO Sung-mo Lee to pioneer future food through so-called’A·B·C strategies’ such as AI, Big Data, and Cloud.

KT announced on the 25th that it will appoint Bae Soon-min, 41, a former Naver AI leader as the head of the research institute’AI2XL’ (AI To Everything Lab), a new organization within the Institute of Convergence Technology. With 36 trillion won in assets, he is the head of future research projects recruited by KT, the 12th largest in the business world. This is the first time that KT was born in the 1980s as a researcher. KT said, “As a young leader, we expect to revitalize the organization.”

KT announced on the 25th that it has recruited key talents in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) to jump up to the digital platform company’Digico’. From left, Professor Dennis Hong, Professor Bohyeong Han, Senior Vice President Soon-Min Bae (Director of AI2XL Research Institute), and Vice President Sang-Ho Lee (Head of AI Robot Business Division). [사진 KT]

New Director Bae is considered one of the few experts in’vision AI’ in Korea. Vision AI, which means’viewable AI’, is a technology that recognizes objects through images or images. For example, it is applied to’Google Lens’ or’Bixby Vision’, which provides relevant information immediately when a dog is illuminated with a smartphone camera.

Director Bae graduated from Gyeonggi Science High School and KAIST and received his master’s and doctorate degrees from MIT. He worked at Naver’s AI platform’Clova’ since 2018 after working as the AI ​​development team leader at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (CSAIL) and Hanwha Techwin Robot Division. He has the experience of successfully leading a motion recognition business where a person moves and an avatar moves along it. KT said, “The consideration that there will be a lot of demand for technology that can apply vision AI is reflected in the (recruitment of director Bae).”

On this day, KT recruited Professor Dennis Hong of UCLA of the United States and Professor Bo-Hyung Han of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University as technical advisors in the fields of robotics, deep learning and AI image recognition, respectively. Professor Hong is a famous scholar for his ’10 young genius scientists’ (2009) selected by the scientific journal 「Popular Science」 and the world’s first car for the visually impaired. Professor Han is a talented group who won first place in the 2015 AI Pattern Recognition International Society (ICCV) object tracking algorithm contest’VOT Challenge’. In the future, they plan to participate in the development of technologies that can solve social and ethical issues related to AI machine learning.

Talent to recruit AI from domestic companies. Graphic = Reporter Kim Young-ok [email protected]

Telecom companies are focusing on’post-communication’ to escape from the stagnation of growth. Above all, it is putting effort into organizing a dedicated organization and recruiting talents in order to nurture the AI ​​field that has emerged as a food for the future. All three companies have young scientists in their 40s and 50s, and their’AI Three Kingdoms’ attracts attention.

In 2018, SK Telecom hired Dr. Yoon Kim (50), a former leader of the voice recognition development team at Apple’Siri’. Dr. Kim is currently leading AI research as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SK Telecom. In November of last year, it became a hot topic by unveiling the AI ​​semiconductor’Sapion X220′, which has 1.5 times faster computation speed than before.

LG U+ is participating in’LG AI Research Institute’ with group affiliates such as LG Electronics, Display, and CNS. LG AI Research Institute is an organization responsible for securing original AI technology and solving related issues. At the end of last year, Lee Hong-rak (44), a 44-year-old professor at the University of Michigan, from Google’s AI research organization’Google Brain’, was recruited as the’Best AI Scientist’.

Reporter Kwon Yujin [email protected]