CDS Faculty Kyunghyun Cho is awarded Samsung Ho-Am Prize
At CDS, we’re proud of every contribution made by our students and faculty to their respective fields. When those contributions are recognized outside of our community it is cause for celebration. This is especially the case for the recent awarding of the Samsung Ho-Am Prize to CDS faculty member Kyunghyun Cho.
For those unfamiliar with the honor, the Samsung Ho-Am Prize was established in 1990 by Kun-Hee Lee, the Chairman of Samsung at the time, to “create a new corporate culture that continues the noble spirit of public service espoused by Byung-chull Lee, founder of Samsung.” It is given by the Ho-Am Foundation each year to individuals who made outstanding contributions to the fields of Physics and Mathematics, Chemistry and Life Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, the Arts, and community service.
Professor Cho was given the 2021 prize for Engineering which covers both basic engineering and applied technology, and is “presented to people of Korean heritage whose accomplishments have contributed to the development of industry for greater prosperity for humanity.” The award recognizes Professor Cho’s work in developing a neural machine translation algorithm that uses the context of the source text to provide highly accurate and overall better quality translations. This algorithm is currently being used in many translation tools available to end-users and has had an enormous impact in the field of artificial intelligence translations.
Professor Cho remarked on the honor of being a recipient of the prestigious award by saying:
“It is a great honour to receive this award. I believe this award recognizes not only my own work, but what we have been able to collectively achieve over many decades in the field of deep learning and more broadly artificial intelligence and data science.”
Other receipts of the Ho-Am Prize include film director Bong Joon Ho, MIT professor Jae S. Lim, and UC San Diego professor Andrew B. Kahng among many others. More information about the prize and past recipients can be found on the Ho-Am Foundation’s website.
