NAVER : Welcomes AI Experts to R&D Community to Pioneer Next Generation of AI Search Technology

NAVER Welcomes AI Experts to R&D Community to Pioneer Next Generation of AI Search Technology

- Renowned experts in AI including Dr. Kim Yoon-hyung from MIT and Dr. Karl Stratos from Rutgers University join NAVER's R&D community

- NAVER also recently recruited Dr. Kim Yong-bum who was responsible for the AI technologies behind Cortana and Alexa to accelerate R&D on AI-powered search

- NAVER to continue building a network of leading AI researchers in the U.S. and Europe to further advance its next-generation AI capabilities to enhance search products and services

2021-01-24

NAVER Corp. (KRX: 035420) announced that it has recently welcomed global artificial intelligence (AI) experts Dr. Kim Yoon-hyung (Yoon Kim) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Karl Stratos (Jang Sung Lee) from Rutgers University to its research and development (R&D) community, NAVER Scholar.

This expansion of NAVER's R&D network is in line with the firm's continuous efforts to advance its global AI search competitiveness. Dr. Kim Yoon-hyung and Dr. Karl Stratos' acceptance of the invitation to NAVER Scholar is a testament to the company's strengths in AI search.NAVER Scholars is a R&D community with members consisting of professors and researchers from universities and research institutes across the U.S. and Europe. The members play an integral role in the development of next-generation AI technology and search capabilities at the NAVER Search US, the company's AI center located in the United States.

Dr. Kim Yoon-hyung, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University is currently an Assistant Professor at MIT. His 2014 paper titled 'Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification' received great attention from academia and the AI industry and was cited over 12,000 times globally. His other published works such as 'Character-Aware Neural Language Models' and 'OpenNMT: Open-Source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation' are also often referred to, spearheading innovation in deep-learning R&D.

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Dr. Karl Stratos is focused on unsupervised representation learning and knowledge-intensive natural language processing (NLP) models. Dr. Stratos is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is currently serving as a committee chair in machine learning at top-tier NLP conferences including the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (ENMLP) and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Aside from his academic accomplishments, he has extensive experience in NLP and also led a project which applied deep learning technology to a Natural Language Understanding service while serving as a senior research scientist on Bloomberg's NLP research team. His study on mutual information maximization (MI) redefined the fundamentals of AI research methodology based on information theory. He has been recognized for his outstanding contributions in AI, with awards such as the Google Faculty Research Award in 2020.

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NAVER has been actively scouting outstanding global AI talents with the aim to apply their breakthroughs to its search products and services. The two new experts will work together with Dr. Kim Yong-bum, who leads the AI technology development in NAVER Search US to bring forth the next generation of search technologies through AI which will be applied to NAVER search products and services. Dr. Kim, a globally renowned expert in conversational AI technology, was appointed to further bolster NAVER Search capabilities in September 2021. He was responsible for leading the development of the AI technology behind Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa.

​"NAVER Search will combine big data from NAVER's platforms, technology and expertise in service operation with knowledge and insights from leading AI experts to continuously innovate services that can enrich consumers' search experience," said Kim Kwang-hyun, head of NAVER Search. "We will continue to recruit the world's best AI talents to fortify NAVER's global R&D ecosystem and strengthen our competitive edge in search technology."

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