SNU
academicSeoul National University is Korea's top national university; its AI effort spans Computer Science & Engineering, ECE, the Interdisciplinary Program in AI (directed by TPAMI editor-in-chief Kyoung Mu Lee), the AI Institute (AIIS), and the Graduate School of Data Science (dean Jaejin Lee). Legacy NLP encoders (KR-BERT, KR-SBERT, ~1M+ downloads) and the KoBALT-700 linguistics benchmark ship under the snunlp org.
The flagship is Jaejin Lee's Thunder Research Group (GitHub org mcrl): a fully documented, low-budget sovereign-AI-style Korean LLM pipeline — Thunder-LLM (Llama 3.1 8B adapted with ~3TB of Korean-heavy continual pretraining), the Thunder-Tok tokenizer (~44% fewer tokens than Llama's on Korean), SEDD GPU deduplication, the SNU_Ko-* localized eval suite, and Thunder-DeID for Korean legal text.
Around it: Hyun Oh Song's MLLab efficiency line (KVzip, NeurIPS 2025 Oral; GuidedQuant, ICML 2025), Gunhee Kim's Behavior-SD full-duplex dialogue corpus (NAACL 2025 SAC Award), and the systems legacy of Orca — the OSDI 2022 continuous-batching paper beneath every modern LLM serving stack, whose author Byung-Gon Chun now runs FriendliAI. Industry edges are tracked at those labs: the SNUH KMed.ai medical LLM is Naver-built, Gunhee Kim contributes to SKT's A.X K1, Byoung-Tak Zhang's robot-FM work ships via his spin-out Tommoro Robotics.
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- Kyoung Mu Lee Google Scholar — Professor, ECE (CVLab); Director, Interdisciplinary Program in AI; Editor-in-Chief, IEEE TPAMI
- Byung-Gon Chun Google Scholar — Professor, CSE (on leave); Founder & CEO, FriendliAI
- Gunhee Kim Google Scholar — Professor, CSE (Vision & Learning Lab); Founder & CEO, RippleAI
- Byoung-Tak Zhang Google Scholar — POSCO Chair Professor, CSE; AI Institute (AIIS); CEO, Tommoro Robotics; chairs national K-Humanoid Alliance
- Jaejin Lee Google Scholar — Professor, CSE; Dean, Graduate School of Data Science; leads Thunder Research Group