Please note: This distinguished lecture will take place in DC 1302 and online.
Kyunghyun Cho
Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics
Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, New York University
During the past 15 years or so, I have worked on a series of seemingly distinct but eventually related problems, including machine learning algorithms, generative modeling with neural networks, machine translation, language modeling, medical imaging, a bit of healthcare, protein modeling and a bit of drug discovery. I chose to work on some of these problems intentionally, while it was pure serendipity that I worked on some others. It was only in hindsight that these seemingly different problems turned out to be closely related to each other from both technical, social and personal perspectives.
In this talk, I plan to do my own retrospective on my own choices, be they intentional or not, on these problems and share with you my thoughts what our own discipline, which is sometimes called computer science, data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence, is.
Bio: Kyunghyun Cho is the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics and a professor of computer science and data science at New York University. He is also a CIFAR Fellow of Learning in Machines & Brains and an Associate Member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea. Early 2021, he co-founded Prescient Design which was acquired by Genentech late 2021. Since then, he served as an Executive Director of Frontier Research and a Senior Fellow at Genentech until January 2026. He served as a (co-)Program Chair of ICLR 2020, NeurIPS 2022 and ICML 2022 and also on the boards of ICML and ICLR. He was one of the three founding Editors-in-Chief of the Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) until 2024.
He was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research from June 2017 to May 2020 and a postdoctoral fellow at University of Montreal until Summer 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio, after receiving MSc and PhD degrees from Aalto University April 2011 and April 2014, respectively, under the supervision of Prof. Juha Karhunen, Dr. Tapani Raiko and Dr. Alexander Ilin. He received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering in 2021. He tries his best to find a balance among machine learning, natural language processing, and life, but almost always fails to do so.
To attend this distinguished lecture in person, please go to DC 1302. You can also attend virtually on Zoom.