LG AI Graduate School’s First Master’s Graduates! A Full-Fledged Start to Developing Talent for Practical AI

Since its official opening on March 2, 2022, LG AI Graduate School, which trains various LG Group employees into AI experts, has produced its first class of Master’s candidates. LG AI Research held the “LG AI Graduate School Graduation Ceremony” at the Vision Hall of the ISC Building, LG Science Park on February 7th, and awarded diplomas to five Master’s graduates.

One of LG AI Research's educational programs, LG AI Graduate School, aims to educate several LG Group employees in the field of AI. In a situation in which the scope of AI talent that can be recruited from outside is limited, LG AI Graduate School, which fosters individuals within the LG group into AI talent, is a great alternative to overcome the chronic talent shortage. High effectiveness is anticipated as the training is being given to employees who are already familiar with their work. Graduates can immediately apply what they have learned in graduate school to the workplace thanks to a practice-oriented curriculum.

LG AI Graduate School operated its LG Master of AI in pilot form for 9 months from March 29, 2021, to December 17, 2021, and produced four graduates in this process. After its official opening on March 2, 2022, the school admitted five people to the Master's course and six people to the Doctoral course. Five Master's students who joined after the official opening of the school completed theoretical education at a level comparable to that of an external educational institution's Master's program for a total of nine months until December 16, 2022. What's more, they carried out research using information and issues from actual subsidiaries, and completed their Master's theses through their own research tasks and graduated.

To graduate from LG AI Graduate School, the graduates who received degrees this time wrote theses and proceeded with proposals and defenses, the same way they would at an external educational institution. In addition, the LG AI Graduate School has formed a three-person screening committee, including one professor invited from an external AI graduate school, to secure the public’s confidence in these graduation theses.

Jungyun Seo, the AI Talent Development Supervisor of LG AI Research, gave a congratulatory speech at the ceremony, saying, "Today is a meaningful day, in which the first graduates were produced after the establishment of the Graduate School of AI. As new experts in the field of AI, I hope that each one of you will return to work and discover new problems to apply AI techniques to achieve results. It will be an interesting process.”

Then, the certificates were delivered to the five Master's graduates. Jihoon Kim of LG AI Research, Sungchan Park of LG Energy Solutions, Younghwan Jeon of LG Energy Solutions, Siyang Ju of LG Energy Solutions, and Hyunjoon Tak of LG Energy Solutions completed the Master’s course.

The students graduated with the following master's theses: "A Study on Representation Learning using Image and Time Series Data based on Modular Co-Attention Layers for Defect Analysis of the Battery Lamination Process" by Jihoon Kim of LG AI Research, "Anomaly Detection for Field Failure" by Sungchan Park of LG Energy Solutions, "Anomaly detection for battery cycle data using TadGAN" by Younghwan Jeon of LG Energy Solutions, "Detecting Defected Lithium-Ion Battery Cells using Self and Semi-Supervised Learning" by Siyang Ju of LG Energy Solutions, and "Research on autoencoder based anomaly detection methods in ESS battery" by Hyunjoon Tak of LG Energy Solutions.

Kyunghoon Bae, Chief of LG AI Research, who delivered the certificates to the graduates, congratulated them, saying, “LG AI Graduate School is a program recognized by LG as an official Master’s and Doctoral degree. As this is the beginning of becoming an AI expert, please take pride in your achievement.”

LG Energy Solutions Senior Younghwan Jeon, who graduated from the LG AI Graduate School Master's course this time, commented, "The most important thing in AI is data, and since this graduate school is actually within LG, I was able to secure data and solve problems from the point of view of the actual field," emphasizing the advantages of LG AI Graduate School.

LG AI Research Jihoon Kim explained why he applied, saying, “I work at LG AI Research, but my major was actually mechanical engineering. I’ve dealt with quality and data a lot, but I was unfamiliar with AI algorithms. After becoming part of LG AI Research, I applied to the LG AI Graduate School as soon as I started working, thinking that it would be difficult working at this subsidiary if I didn’t know much about AI.”

LG AI Research's Jinseok Yang, a professor at LG AI Graduate School, expressed his impressions of education, saying, "All the problems brought by the graduates were fun, and it was good to actively build their skills. I'm grateful to hear that they learned a lot."

After conferring the degrees, an award ceremony was held for the Best Collaboration Award. Senior Junho Lee of LG Display, who is currently enrolled in the LG AI Graduate School’s Doctoral course, received the Best Collaboration Award. Senior Lee, together with Youngrok Jang, Kyunghun Kim, and Hosung Song of the LG AI Research Language Lab, submitted a research paper to a chemical entity recognition contest called ChEMU in June of last year and won first place. In this contest, Senior Lee worked on the post-processing part and was included as the third author in this paper.

Three new professors were also appointed to be in charge of fostering AI talent at the LG AI Graduate School. Jinsik Lee, EXAONE Lab Leader of LG AI Research, Ireun Kim of the EXAONE Lab, and Youngrok Jang of the LG AI Research Language Lab joined as new professors.

The LG AI Graduate School trained four people in its pilot program in 2021 and 11 people in 2022 after the official opening. It plans to increase the number of people trained to 30 in 2023. All four students who participated in the pilot program in 2021 completed the Master’s course, and the five new students who participated in the Master’s course in 2022 also graduated. And, in 2023, the first graduates of the LG AI Graduate School Doctoral course are expected to be produced. Unlike the Master’s course, which is nine months, the LG AI Graduate School Doctoral course is a longer program that takes at least 18 months and is conducted part-time. Graduation from this course is possible only when a thesis is published in an SCI-level journal.

As LG AI Graduate School is a program for executives and employees of LG subsidiaries, all students participate already armed with sufficient knowledge of practical domains in their respective fields. Therefore, after graduation, they can apply what they have learned in graduate school by combining it with their jobs. Instead of constructing a curriculum with theory-oriented lectures, it is possible to focus on practical cases that can be applied in the field, dealing with field tasks held by LG Group subsidiaries as research topics.

Above all, LG AI Graduate School has excellent faculty, led by Kyunghoon Bae, president of LG AI Graduate School, who is currently serving as the Chief of LG AI Research, and Honglak Lee, Chief Scientist of AI at LG AI Research, who was selected as one of the top 10 AI researchers in the world by the International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. LG AI Graduate School plans to continue to foster practical AI talent that will lead the innovation of the LG Group based on systematic education programs and excellent faculty.