Executive Vice President, Head of Language & Voice Team, Samsung Research

Corporate Executive Vice President, Samsung Research

Head of Language & Voice Team

Global AI Center,

Samsung Research, Seoul South Korea

Phone: +82-10-4043-3996
E-mail: chanw.com at samsung.com, chanwcom at gmail.com

Research Area

End-to-end fully neural Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
End-to-end fully neural Text-To-Speech (TTS)
Speech pre-processing and enhancement
Language Modeling (LM)
Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
Machine Translation (MT)
Question and Answering (QA)
Dialog System

For papers refer to the following Google Scholar link:

Education

  • Ph. D. Language and Information Technologies, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Dec. 2010.

  • M. S. Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Feb. 2001.

  • B. S. Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University, Feb. 1998.

  • Seoul Science High School, Feb. 1994.

Work Experience

  • Samsung Research, Corporate Executive Vice President (EVP) (Dec. 2021 ~ Present), Head of Voice & Language Team. Seoul, South Korea
    (Feb. 2018 ~ Present)

  • Google, Senior Software Engineer, Google Speech, Mountain View, CA, USA
    (Feb. 19th, 2013 ~ Feb. 18th, 2018)

  • Microsoft, Speech Scientist, Redmond, WA, USA
    (Jan. 4th, 2011 ~ Jan. 30th, 2013)

  • LG Electronics, Senior Research Engineer, Seoul, South Korea
    (June 3rd, 2003 ~ Aug. 8th, 2005)

  • Edumediatek, Research Engineer, Seoul, South Korea
    (2000 ~ 2002)

Award

  • (1st-author) IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, 2019.
  • (1st-author) 17-th Samsung Human Tech Thesis Bronze Prize, Feb., 2011.
  • (1st-author) 16-th, Samsung Human Tech Thesis Honour Prize, Feb., 2010.
  • Research Fellowship for Ph. D. study (2005-2010), Carnegie Mellon University, Jan. 2005.
  • Scholarship for studying abroad (2005-2007), Korea Institute of Energy Evaluation and Planning, July 2005.
  • Graduate cum laude with a bachelors degree, Seoul National University, Feb. 1998.

Commercialization achievements

  • Samsung on-device end-to-end neural speech recognition for room and floor air conditioners
  • Samsung on-device end-to-end neural speech recognition for dictation on mobile phones
  • Samsung on-device neural Text-To-Speech (TTS) for Android
  • Samsung cloud neural Text-To-Speech (TTS) for Bixby
  • Speech pre-processing and wakeup for Galaxy Home Mini.
  • Speech pre-processing for Room Air Conditioners
  • Sound Event Detection engine for Samsung Robot Vacuum Cleaners.
  • Data-augmentation for speech recognition used in Google Home and Google Voice Search
  • Acoustic Modeling (AM) of Google speech recognition systems for Google Assistants and Google Voice

Professional Services

  • IEEE ICASSP 2024 Organizing Committee
  • INTERSPEECH 2022 Industry Liaison Chair
  • AAAI 2021 Senior Program Committee (SPC)
  • INTERSPEECH 2020 Session Chair
  • Served as a reviewer for various conferences and journals including ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, Eurasip Journals, Signal Processing Systems, Speech Communication, and so on.

Short Biography

Chanwoo Kim has been a corporate executive vice president at Samsung research leading the language and voice team. He joined Samsung research as a corporate vice president heading the speech processing Lab in Feb. 2018. He has been leading research on end-to-end speech recognition, end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS), machine translation, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Language Modeling (LM) and Question Answering (QA), speech enhancement, key-word spotting, and so on at Samsung Research. Most of these research outcomes have been commercialized for Samsung products. He was a software engineer at the Google speech team between Feb. 2013 and Feb. 2018. He worked for acoustic modeling for speech recognition systems and enhancing noise robustness using deep learning techniques. While working for Google, he contributed to data-augmentation and acoustic modeling of Google speech recognition systems. He contributed to the commercialization of various Google AI speakers and google speech recognition systems. He was a speech scientist at Microsoft from Jan. 2011 to Jan. 2013. Dr. Kim received his Ph. D. from the Language Technologies Institute of School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University in Dec. 2010. He received his B.S and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Dr. Kim’s doctoral research was focused on enhancing the robustness of automatic speech recognition systems in noisy environments. Between 2003 and 2005 Dr. Kim was a Senior Research Engineer at LG Electronics, where he worked primarily on embedded signal processing and protocol stacks for multimedia systems. Prior to his employment at LG, he worked for EdumediaTek and SK Teletech as an R&D engineer.