KAIST student becomes first Korean recipient of Apple Scholars fellowship

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

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Tue, September 26, 2023 | 07:55

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KAIST student becomes first Korean recipient of Apple Scholars fellowship

Posted : 2023-03-20 08:55

Updated : 2023-03-21 09:24

Lee Sea-nie

By Lee Kyung-min

Lee Sea-nie, a second-year doctoral degree student at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has made the list of 2023 recipients of the Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD fellowship, a program for developing excellence in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, according to the university, Sunday.

Lee is the first Korean to receive the Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD fellowship. He will be mentored by Apple engineers.

He will be among 22 Ph.D. students from leading universities around the world, including Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University. Only four Asian students were among the recipients. Two are from China and one is from Hong Kong.

Lee is a researcher in the field of "transfer learning," a research problem in machine learning that focuses on storing gained knowledge while solving a problem and applying it to a different but related problem. For example, knowledge gained while learning to recognize cars could be applied when trying to recognize trucks. His works were published in 11 papers.

"AI research has mostly been focused on computer vision so far, but I want to use the technology in advancing the works of natural sciences including physics," Lee said.

Advised by KAIST professors Hwang Sung-ju and Lee Ju-ho, his research focuses on making deep learning models more data-efficient. In particular, Lee is investigating ways to learn data augmentation or regularization techniques to efficiently fine-tune pre-trained models on domain-specific data.

He graduated from Yonsei University and interned at the National University of Singapore, advised by Kenji Kawaguchi.

The Apple scholarship was launched in 2020 to foster promising new computer science researchers.

It is committed to supporting the academic research community by amplifying emerging leaders in their field and their cutting-edge machine learning research.

The program recognizes the contributions of researchers in computer science and engineering at the graduate and postgraduate levels, according to the program organizer. Each Scholar receives funding as they pursue their Ph.D., internship opportunities, and mentorship with an Apple researcher in their field.

lkm@koreatimes.co.kr