Mr. Son Hoyeol. Provided by KU.

By Park Jaewon (jaewonpark02@korea.ac.kr)

A Korea University (KU) graduate has risen as a star in the AI developer community. In February 2023, Son Hoyeol (‘16, Department of Statistics) took 1st place in Kaggle, a renowned data science and technology competition hosted by Google. The competition features a series of social issues to which developers publicly present their solutions to be compared with other options. Son’s presented challenge was tackling how to classify isolated American Sign Language (ASL) signs through Google’s TensorFlow Lite framework. Son won the title of top 20 Kaggle participant in the world, along with 50,000 USD as prize money.

In an interview with KU, Son revealed that he first took interest in AI development after taking a course in his senior year. He participated in multiple Kaggle tournaments in the past, earning 2 gold, 3 silver, and a bronze medal, putting him in the top 0.1 percent of AI experts. His latest work caught the attention of the community for its creative approach in utilizing a one-dimensional Convolution Neural Network (1D-CNN) combined with a Transformer system and achieving incredible accuracy. His work is to be implemented in the ASL learning app Popsign, and is expected to greatly aid those struggling to learn the language.