POSTECH: Collaborations Between POSTECH Faculty and Google on the Rise

The number of research collaborations between POSTECH’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering faculty and Google is on the rise. Google has been supporting the research activities, academic development, and technological innovation at universities around the world, and provides various support programs, including the Google Research Grant and PhD Fellowship Program for faculty members and students.

In July 2021, Professor Seungmoon Choi was selected as the recipient of the Google Research Grant program. With this support, Professor Choi successfully conducted the study on improving algorithms for sound-to-haptics conversion. In March of this year, Professor Jaesik Park was selected for the Google Cloud research credits program and gained access to Google Cloud Computing (GCP). Selected as the winner of Google’s 2022 exploreCSR award in August, Professor Hyojin Sung will receive support for a research and career exploration workshop for female students in the computing field. Professor Sung plans to develop the workshop into a larger community of participants in the future with continued interaction.

Since May 2022, Professor Namhoon Lee has been conducting a collaborative research through a visiting researcher program at Google’s Core ML team. In October, Professor Minsu Cho – who is taking a sabbatical year – will work at Google France as a visiting researcher on video analysis with the research team led by Dr. Cordelia Schmid, a world-renowned scholar in computer vision and machine learning. The study will be an extension of the recent research on video understanding techniques conducted by Professor Cho’s research team, focusing on addressing the structural weakness and inefficacy of conventional transformer neural networks.

Professor Eunhyeok Park, who has been partnering with Google since 2021, has been working to optimize the performance of neural networks based on quantization, keeping the accuracy and improving the quality of the networks under the theme of studying the quality degradation from quantization. The findings from the study will be presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in October, one of the three major conferences in the field of computer vision.

PhD candidate Juhong Min (advisor Minsu Cho) was selected as the only Korean in the 2020 Google PhD Fellowship in the division of Machine Perception, Speech Technology, and Computer Vision. Since 2009, Google has conducted a PhD Fellowship Program, which selects outstanding graduate students conducting exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields. The awarded students are provided with scholarship as well as networking opportunities with Google Research Mentor.

Meanwhile, Professor Jaehoon Jeong of the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence (GSAI) and Department of Mathematics was selected for the Google Conference Sponsorship Program. With Professor Bokwang Jeon (Department of Mathematics), Professor Moo K. Chung of the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States, and Professor Shizuo Kaji of the Kyushu University in Japan, Professor Jeong held a four-day conference from the September 26 on the theme of ‘Topological Data Analysis and Machine Learning’ and presented the study findings on the combination of topological data analysis (TDA) and machine learning.