Biography:Kyunghyun Cho

From HandWiki
Short description: American and South Korean computer scientist (born 1985)
Kyunghyun Cho
Cho at NeurIPS in 2025
Born1985 (age 40–41)
South Korea
Citizenship
  • United States
  • South Korea
Academic background
Education
  • KAIST (B.Sc)
  • Aalto University (M.Sc, D.Sc)
Academic work
DisciplineMachine learning, deep learning, natural language processing
InstitutionsNew York University
Template:Infobox Korean name/auto
Websitekyunghyuncho.me

Kyunghyun Cho[1] (Korean: 조경현; born 1985) is an American and South Korean computer scientist. He is a professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University's Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science. He has also been the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics since 2025.

Cho is a researcher in machine learning, especially deep learning. He was a coauthor on a 2014 paper that introduced neural machine translation.

Biography

Cho was born in 1985 in South Korea[2] to father Kyu-Ick Cho (조규익), a professor of Korean literature at Soongsil University, and mother Im Mi-Sook, a Korean language teacher. His mother retired from teaching to focus on raising Cho and his younger brother.[3] He grew up in Seoul.[4]

Cho received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from KAIST in South Korea in 2009. He received his Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Mining and Doctor of Science from Aalto University in Finland in 2011 and 2014 respectively. He then was a postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal, where he studied under Yoshua Bengio until the summer of 2015.[1] In 2014, Cho coauthored a paper[5] with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Bengio that introduced neural machine translation and attention for neural networks, concepts that have since become highly influential in machine learning.[4][2]

In 2015, he joined the faculty of Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science at New York University (NYU). In 2019, he was granted tenure and made a professor of Computer Science and Data Science at NYU.[6] He was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research from 2017 to 2020.[1]

In 2024, he became co-head of the Global AI Frontier Lab at NYU with Yann LeCun.[7] In 2025, he was made the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics by the Courant Institute.[8]

Awards

In 2020, he was named AI Researcher of the Year by the South Korean company Samsung.[6] In 2021, he received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Engineering, one of South Korea's most prestigious awards for academics.[3]

At some point, Cho renounced his South Korean citizenship. In 2025, the South Korean government granted Cho citizenship again, in recognition of his contributions to artificial intelligence.[9]

Philanthropy

Cho donated the $30,000 he received with Samsung AI Researcher of the Year award to the research institute Mila to support female students studying computer science from abroad.[10]

The Ho-Am Prize came with prize money of ₩300 million (before taxes; around $273,000). Cho donated much of this money to establish several scholarships and awards.[3][4] He donated €30,000 ($35,400) to Aalto University to support female students from outside the European Union studying computer science.[11][4] Cho donated ₩100 million ($90,900) each to KAIST to establish a Lim Mi-Sook Scholarship (임미숙 장학금), which is named for his mother and meant to support female engineers.[3][4] Another ₩100 million was spent to establish a Baek-Gyu Award for Scholarly Award for Classics. The award, named in honor of the art name of his literature scholar father, is for researchers in Korean classical literature and art.[3]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "About me". https://kyunghyuncho.me/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 전혜원 (2021-11-23). "세계적 인공지능 석학, AI의 편향을 말하다" (in ko). 시사IN. https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=46066. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 김미리 (2021-07-03). "넥타이도 못매는 이 남자... 'AI 혁명' 최전선에 서다" (in ko). The Chosun Ilbo. https://www.chosun.com/national/weekend/2021/07/03/42RF6ZBIURCBHGPGTDYKIH34CM/. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Rutka, Alison (2021-07-19). "Leading with generosity" (in en-US). https://cifar.ca/cifarnews/2021/07/19/leading-with-generosity/. 
  5. ↑ Bahdanau, Dzmitry; Cho, Kyunghyun; Bengio, Yoshua (2016-05-19). "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate". arXiv:1409.0473 [cs.CL].
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 김영민 (2020-11-02). "삼성 첫 AI 연구자상, 35세 조경현 뉴욕대 종신교수 등 5명이 받았다" (in ko). https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/23909559. 
  7. ↑ "S. Korean science ministry opens joint AI research lab with NYU" (in en). 2024-09-24. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3480725. 
  8. ↑ "Kyunghyun Cho Named Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics". 2025-02-27. https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1477/. 
  9. ↑ 김나영 (2025-11-20). "법무부, 'AI 석학' 조경현 교수 등 우수인재들에 한국 국적 부여" (in ko). The Chosun Ilbo. https://www.chosun.com/national/court_law/2025/11/20/J3AJXIPZ3BDDNA3PCHAXJVIJIY/. 
  10. ↑ "Samsung AI Researcher of the Year". https://cs.nyu.edu/dynamic/about/news/454/. 
  11. ↑ "First scholarships from Kyunghyun Cho's donation awarded to women studying computer science". 2022-11-21. https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/first-scholarships-from-kyunghyun-chos-donation-awarded-to-women-studying-computer-science. 



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