Eunseop Yoon (advisor: Professor Chang D. Yoo) and Wooyoung Jo (advisor: Professor Joo-Young Kim), Ph.D. candidates at the KAIST School of Electrical Engineering, have been selected for the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship.
The Google PhD Fellowship recognizes outstanding graduate students who are conducting exceptional and innovative research in computer science and related fields, specifically focusing on candidates who seek to influence the future of technology. Google states, “The program provides vital direct financial support for their PhD pursuits and connects each Fellow with a dedicated Google Research Mentor, reinforcing our commitment to nurturing the academic community.”
This prestigious global program has supported more than 300 talented researchers worldwide since its launch in 2009. Each year, only three to four students from Korea are selected; this year, four students—two from KAIST and two from Seoul National University—were recognized for their research excellence.
Selected in the field of Natural Language Processing, Eunseop Yoon conducts research that offers deep insights into the convergence of language and reasoning at the core of AI innovation. In 2012, computer vision–based object recognition technology opened the door to AI innovation by challenging human visual perception. Over the past three years, the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has once again propelled the evolution of artificial intelligence with the emergence of large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek.
Yoon shared, “Through this Fellowship, I look forward to collaborating with world-leading researchers and advancing language understanding technologies that enable more natural interactions between humans and AI.”
In the field of Silicon Research, Wooyoung Jo was recognized for his outstanding research achievements in the design of ultra-low-power and low-latency System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures for on-device conversational AI. In particular, he proposed an SoC architecture capable of performing conversational AI tasks and demonstrated methods to simultaneously improve computational efficiency and response latency through close collaboration between hardware and software. This work was presented at IEEE ISSCC 2025, the most prestigious conference in the semiconductor field.
Jo remarked, “I plan to further explore hardware–software co-optimization techniques to enhance real-time processing performance and energy efficiency in on-device AI systems and to develop a System-on-Chip platform for their verification.”
This fellowship is provided with support from Google.org, and each of the selected students will receive USD 10,000 in funding along with a one-on-one mentorship opportunity with a Google Researcher.
Their achievements extend beyond individual success—they mark a meaningful step in expanding the foundation of AI research in Korea and enhancing its global competitiveness. These recognitions further advance system-level research in AI semiconductors and highlight Korea’s growing capabilities in developing next-generation on-device AI platforms.
** Google PhD Fellowship website
https://research.google/programs-and-events/phd-fellowship/#award-recipients-6
