Professor at Sejong University, South Korea
Dr. Yong-Guk Kim is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Sejong University, Seoul, Korea, and a renowned expert in artificial intelligence and computer vision. His academic journey has taken him from Korea to prestigious institutions in the UK, Netherlands, and the US, contributing significantly to fields like Generative AI, facial expression recognition, and autonomous drone technology. With a career spanning over three decades, Dr. Kim has excelled in both academic research and industry collaborations, leading innovative AI projects and earning multiple accolades in international AI challenges.
Profile
ORCID
Education:
Dr. Kim completed his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, specializing in computational vision, from Cambridge University, where he explored visual surface representation for transparency, occlusion, and brightness. He also holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, majoring in Automatic Control, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, both from Korea University. His education set the foundation for a career at the intersection of engineering and cognitive science, particularly in AI and computer vision applications.
Experience:
Dr. Kim’s diverse career includes research roles at major organizations such as LG and KT in Korea, followed by advanced research opportunities abroad. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smith-Kettlewell Vision Institute in San Francisco and as an EU fellow at the Robotics Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has served as a faculty member at Sejong University for over two decades, holding leadership positions such as Dean of International Affairs and Head of the Start-up Incubator. He has successfully founded the startup Affectronics, specializing in mobile 3D avatars, and played a pivotal role in several AI challenges, showcasing his expertise in applied AI.
Research Interest:
Dr. Kim’s primary research areas lie in Generative AI and Computer Vision. His work encompasses multi-modal large language models, video anomaly detection, and facial expression recognition, with a particular focus on real-world applications such as autonomous drones and personalized advertising platforms. His lab has made significant strides in AI-driven tasks, such as autonomous drone racing and emotion detection, winning multiple international competitions. His research is well-funded by both governmental bodies and private industries, highlighting the practical and impactful nature of his work.
Awards:
Dr. Kim has received numerous awards for his contributions to AI, particularly in global competitions. Notably, his lab won the prestigious Game of Drones Challenge in 2019, organized by Microsoft and Stanford University at the NeurIPS conference. He also placed second in the Inpainting and Denoising Challenge at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2018 and won the Fake Emotion Detection Challenge at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2017. These achievements underscore his prominence in the AI research community and his ability to lead teams in high-stakes, competitive environments.
Publications:
Dr. Kim has published extensively in top-tier journals, contributing to the advancement of AI and computer vision. His recent works include:
“Reinforcement Learning Based Drone Simulators: Survey, Practice, and Challenge” (2024) – Artificial Intelligence Review (Cited by: 281) Link.
“UET4Rec: U-net Encapsulated Transformer for Sequential Recommender” (2024) – Expert Systems with Applications (Cited by: 781) Link.
“Meme Analysis using LLM-based Contextual Information“ (2024) – IEEE Access (Cited by: 5) Link.
“Attention-based Residual Autoencoder for Video Anomaly Detection” (2023) – Applied Intelligence (Cited by: 240) Link.
“A Promising AI-based Tool to Simulate Hydrogen Sulfide Elimination” (2023) – Separation and Purification Technology (Cited by: 472) Link.
Conclusion:
Dr. Yong-Guk Kim’s extensive contributions to AI and computer vision, coupled with his successful track record in international AI challenges, academic excellence, and industry collaboration, make him a strong candidate for the Best Researcher Award. His teaching and entrepreneurial achievements further add to his case, demonstrating both academic prowess and real-world impact. By expanding his research into newer domains and engaging more with public discourse on AI, he could further solidify his standing as a world-class researcher.