World-renowned scholars gather at Samsung Campus to give AI lectures.
Over 1,500 experts attended, sharing research results and exploring innovation.
Providing expert advice sessions on research for college students
Samsung Electronics hosted the 'Samsung AI Forum 2018' on the 12th and 13th, inviting world-renowned AI scholars to share the latest AI research trends and explore directions for application and innovation.

Launched last year, the forum's first day was hosted by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology at the Samsung Electronics Seocho building, while the second day was hosted by Samsung Research at the Samsung Electronics Seoul R&D Campus in Umyeon-dong. Approximately 1,500 AI experts, professors, and students attended the two-day event.

In addition to in-depth presentations on AI by world-renowned scholars, research exchange activities were also held, allowing university students to present their research results and receive advice from experts.

Day 1 Forum
On the first day, Professor Yann LeCun of New York University in the United States and Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal in Canada gave lectures, followed by Professor Joel Pineau of McGill University, Professor Aaron Courville of the University of Montreal, and Professor Eunho Yang of KAIST, who presented on the latest artificial intelligence technologies and future directions, such as self-supervised learning and deep reinforcement learning. Professors Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio are considered world-renowned experts in the field of deep learning.

In his opening remarks, Samsung Electronics President and CEO Kim Ki-nam said, “We hope that our efforts to innovate AI technology will solve human problems and benefit the world,” and added, “I hope that by inviting world-class AI innovators today, we can confirm the potential of AI technology and lay the foundation for future cooperation.”
Professor Yann LeCun, the first speaker, spoke on "Self-Supervised Learning." He emphasized the need for modeling the complex real world to achieve human-level AI, and proposed "self-supervised learning" as a future challenge.
Professor Yoshua Bengio, participating for the second time since last year, gave a lecture on the topic of 'Optimization and generalization effects of SGD in deep nets.' He presented detailed research results on how SGD-based learning techniques simultaneously impact optimization and generalization. SGD stands for Stochastic Gradient Descent, a type of AI learning and training method that stands for stochastic gradient descent.

Day 2 Forum
On the second day, the conference was divided into two topics: Language/Inference and Vision/Robotics/On-Device AI, and presentations were given by Professor Barry Smith of University College Dublin, Professor Yiannis Demiris of Imperial College London, and Professor Gu-Yeon Wei of Harvard University.

In his opening remarks, Kim Hyun-seok, President and CEO of Samsung Electronics and Head of Samsung Research, said, “I hope this will be an important time to deeply consider the latest technologies and future prospects in the rapidly evolving field of AI,” and added, “I hope that the insights gained through this forum will become the first step toward creating the world that humanity dreams of.”

Sebastian Seung, Vice President and Chief Research Scientist at Samsung Electronics and an authority on brain and neuroscience engineering, will deliver a keynote speech on the topic of “The computer and the brain: a contemporary perspective.” Vice President Seung will present new research methods for integrating neural network research and artificial intelligence, as well as research results using artificial neural networks to understand the structure of the human brain.

MIT Professor Cynthia Breazeal will present "Living and Flourishing with Social Robots," sharing her perspective as a robot design expert on the issues that must be overcome to successfully implement social robots in the real world and the efforts needed to address them.

Meanwhile, the following day, the forum will also host an "AI Challenge" awards ceremony to discover outstanding AI-based ideas and use cases. Held for the first time this year, the AI Challenge was divided into an "AI Hackathon," where participants proposed and implemented ideas combining IT devices and AI technology, and a "Data Challenge," where participants competed on creative problem-solving skills for specific data themes. The finalists, who had passed the online preliminaries that began in July, held the final competition on the 8th to determine the final winner.

Last August, Samsung selected AI as one of its four major future growth businesses and announced its intention to significantly strengthen its research capabilities to secure world-class leadership. To achieve this, Samsung Electronics plans to continue its pioneering AI research and continue to recruit top talent.