KT announced on January 25 that it has recruited key talents in the artificial intelligence (AI) fields to upgrade to digital platform company.
KT hired Dennis Hong, a professor at the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles, as its first step in the new year. Han Bo-hyung, a professor of electrical and information engineering at Seoul National University, was appointed as a technical advisor for Deep Learning and AI Video Recognition, and Dr. Bae Soon-min was recruited as the head of AI2XL (AI To Everything Lab).
By recruiting talented people, KT is planning to strengthen its AI technology, which is a key growth engine for the future, and advance its AI business strategy to lead the era of the fourth industrial revolution.
The keyword for recruiting talent is innovation. KT selected the head of a research institute born in the 1980s for the first time in history and recruited young talent with both innovation and creativity.
Professor Dennis Hong is a scholar who won the National Science Foundation's Young Scientist Award, GM Young Researcher Award, and the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Education Award. He was also named "10 Young Genius Scientists" by Popular Science, a world-renowned science magazine.
He worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech. He is currently the director of UCLA RoMeLa's Robotics and Mechanism Laboratory.
Professor Hong will play an advisory role in the robot business as a whole, and will play a role in raising the market pie of Korea's robot industry, including screening and consulting, in the competition for robot startups.
Dr. Bae Soon-min plays a pivotal role in KT's growth as a digital platform company by presenting strategies for the first-class technology of AI as the head of the new AI2XL Institute of Convergence Technology.
Bae graduated from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) with a master's and doctorate degrees from MIT. Since then, he has led research and development on robots, CCTVs, videos, and avatar AI in Samsung Techwin and Naver.
Director Bae is a Vision AI expert and is planning to present a variety of blueprints for KT AI's overall strategy and qualitative growth in AI field. Vision AI refers to artificial intelligence that reproduces human visual recognition capabilities.
Han Bo-hyung earned a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Maryland State University.
In 2015, he won the first prize at the "Visual Object Tracking (VOT) Challenge" of International Conference on Computer Vision(ICCV), an international society for artificial intelligence pattern recognition. He also won the "AI Focused Research Awards" selected by Google in 2018, and has been conducting joint research for three years so far.
Professor Han is in charge of consulting on the direction of technology development that can solve social and ethical issues related to research and deep learning on the latest technologies of artificial intelligence, AI and machine learning. It allows KT to become a global AI top-tier company and helps KT grow into a company that leads the era of the fourth industrial revolution.
KT hired Lee Sang-ho, who served as the head of AI Robot business group in AI and DX convergence business and served as the head of overall business department through Robotics Business Department from ABB Korea.
Director Lee is in charge of AI robot business and product development. He will also play a role in securing KT's new growth engine by developing a service platform that leads to changes in customers' lives.
"KT is going to make a leap into first place by increasing innovation in high-tech technologies along with world-class AI scholars," said CEO Koo Hyun-mo of KT. "We will focus on technologies and businesses that make customers' lives more valuable."
