KAIST

< Soo Ye Kim, Sanghyun Woo and Hae Beom Lee (from left) >

PhD candidates Soo Ye Kim and Sanghyun Woo from the KAIST School of Electrical Engineering and Hae Beom Lee from the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI were selected as the 2021 Google PhD Fellows. The Google PhD Fellowship is a scholarship program that supports graduate school students from around the world that have produced excellent achievements from promising computer science-related fields. The 75 selected fellows will receive ten thousand dollars of funding with the opportunity to discuss research and receive one-on-one feedback from experts in related fields at Google.

Kim and Woo were named fellows in the field of "Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision" with research of deep learning based super-resolution and  computer vision respectively.  Lee was named a fellow in the field of "Machine Learning" for his research in meta-learning.

Kim's research  includes the formulation of novel methods for super-resolution and HDR video restoration and deep joint frame interpolation and super-resolution methods. Many of her works have been presented in leading conferences in computer vision and AI such as CVPR, ICCV, and AAAI. In addition, she has been collaborating as a research intern with the Vision Group Team at Adobe Research to study depth map refinement techniques. 

(Kim's research on deep learning based joint super-resolution and inverse tone-mapping framework for HDR videos)

Woo’s research includes an effective deep learning model design based on the attention mechanism and learning methods based on self-learning and simulators. His works have been also presented in leading conferences such as CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS. In particular, his work on the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) which was presented at ECCV in 2018 has surpassed over 2700 citations on Google Scholar after being referenced in many computer vision applications. He was also a recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship in 2020.

(Woo's research on attention mechanism based deep learning models)

Lee’s research focuses effectively overcoming various limitations of the existing meta-learning framework. Specifically, he proposed to deal with a realistic task distribution with imbalances, improved the practicality of meta-knowledge, and made meta-learning possible even in large-scale task scenarios. These various studies have been accepted to numerous top-tier machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR. In particular, one of his papers has been selected as an oral presentation at ICLR 2020 and another as a spotlight presentation at NeurIPS 2020.

(Lee's research on learning to balance and continual trajectory shifting)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the award ceremony was held virtually at the Google PhD Fellowship Summit from August 31st to September 1st. The list of fellowship recipients is displayed on the Google webpage.