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KAIST scientist wins 2021 IBM Academic Award
Lee Sang-wan / Courtesy of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
By Lee Kyung-min
By Lee Kyung-min
Lee Sang-wan, an associate professor in the department of bio and brain engineering at KAIST, was named as a 2021 recipient of one of the IBM Academic Awards, the university said Thursday.
The award was given in recognition of his contributions in the field of neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence. Lee is the founding director of the KAIST Center for Neuroscience-inspired Artificial Intelligence.
The IBM Academic Awards are given to those who foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities and IBM researchers and technologists worldwide.
The awards seek to promote curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in emerging academic disciplines. Recipients receive “hardware, software, services, IBM Cloud access and cash,” according to the IBM website.
“The study of interpreting the brain's complex information processing processes using machine learning theory and transplanting the brain's high-level information processing into an artificial intelligence model is still in its infancy. Further joint studies will be conducted with IBM researchers,” Lee said.
The joint research with IBM will utilize brain-artificial intelligence co-evolution technology, a scientific advancement project financed by the Samsung Science & Technology Foundation. Also contributing to the global research will be frontal lobe meta-reinforcement learning, a technology developed with the help of the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation.
Lee's work was published in Science Robotics, a publisher of original, peer-reviewed, science- and engineering-based research articles that advance the field of robotics. The journal also features editor-commissioned reviews.
Another publisher of his work is Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Research. It is a multidisciplinary journal and it covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medicine and biology.
The KAIST Center for Neuroscience-inspired Artificial Intelligence established in 2019 has since led studies and personnel exchange programs with leading global research institutes such as the research laboratory DeepMind Technologies and British artificial intelligence subsidiary Alphabet, the parent company of Google, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford.
Lee won recognition at the Google Faculty Research Awards in 2016 for his research contribution in the field of computational neuroscience. This award program focuses on supporting world-class technical research in computer science, engineering and related fields performed at academic institutions around the world.