Hyundai and Kia have recruited Kyunghyun Cho, associate professor of computer science and data science at New York University (NYU). Cho will provide outside expert counsel to strengthen the group’s development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and its application in the mobility industry.
He will work with researchers at AIRS Company, an organization dedicated to the development of Hyundai and Kia’s AI technologies and AI-based services. He will advise on the application of AI technology to the mobility industry, strategies to overcome the current limitations of AI technology, and the excavation of new AI-based business opportunities.
“We look forward to working with Professor Cho to explore ways to incorporate AI technology in the mobility industry,” said Jeong Hee Kim, VP and head of AIRS Company. “Hyundai and Kia will continue to develop innovative technologies and cooperate with diverse global institutions to become a frontrunner in the future mobility industry.”
Hyundai and Kia are looking to make a transformation from automotive manufacturers to smart mobility solutions providers and are engaged in various projects covering AI agents, machine translators, smart factories and mobility services.
As a renowned figure in the AI field, especially of machine learning and applied AI research, Cho is expected to elevate Hyundai and Kia’s expertise in AI technology research, helping the companies to proactively respond to the growing competition in future mobility development.
Cho earned a doctorate and master’s degree in computer science from Aalto University in Finland, and a bachelor’s degree from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He developed a new, simple yet effective algorithm that can resolve long-term dependency problems within recurrent neural networks (RNN).
He is also considered to have revolutionized AI translation services by developing a neural machine translation (NMT) algorithm that enables high-quality translation by understanding the overall context of the translated sentence, as well as to have shown achievements in the research of multimodal AI systems, a system that can learn different types of combined data such as text and images. Based on such outstanding research achievements, Cho was granted tenure at New York University in 2019.