Notice

Se Jin Park, a doctoral researcher from Professor Yong Man Ro’s laboratory, received his Ph.D. in February 2026 and has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Kyung Hee University as of March 2026. Throughout her doctoral studies, Park has been conducting research on multimodal artificial intelligence that integrates speech, vision, and language, with the goal of enabling natural and seamless interaction between humans and AI.

Park has been developing methods for visual–acoustic representation learning, modeling long- and short-term conversational context, and leveraging both linguistic and nonverbal cues from human interaction for dialogue understanding and generation. Her research achievements have been recognized internationally. She has presented a total of 13 papers at top-tier conferences such as ICML, ACL, CVPR, AAAI, and ICASSP, and her work has been selected for several prestigious distinctions, including the ACL Outstanding Paper Award, ICML Oral, CVPR Highlight, ACL Oral, and AAAI Oral. Through these accomplishments, Park has established herself as a competitive researcher in the fields of multimodal AI and conversational intelligence.

Park has expressed her intention to continue pursuing research on conversational intelligence that enables AI systems to collaborate and communicate effectively with real users in complex interaction environments that combine speech, vision, and language. Our school sincerely congratulates her on this new beginning and looks forward to her future contributions in education, research, and industry collaboration at Kyung Hee University.

Title: Dr. Hong Joo Lee (Advisor: Prof. Yong Man Ro) appointed as Assistant Professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

Dr. Hong Joo Lee, an alumnus of the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST (Advisor: Prof. Yong Man Ro), has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, effective March 1, 2026.

Dr. Lee earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation titled "Investigating Adversarial Robustness via Booster Signal." During his doctoral studies, he participated in the Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (CARAI) for National Defense Research. His research has been widely recognized through numerous publications in top-tier conferences and journals, including CVPR, IEEE TIP, and IEEE TNNLS.

After receiving his doctorate in 2023, Dr. Lee served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany. His postdoctoral work focused on the reliability of AI models in the medical field, leading to further high-impact publications in ECCV, MICCAI, and AAAI.

In his new role as a professor, Dr. Lee plans to deepen his research on Reliable Intelligence Systems, focusing on the vulnerability, safety, and fairness of AI models.