Kyunghyun Cho
Professor of computer science and data science at New York University
An NYU professor who co-authored the 2014 paper that introduced neural machine translation with attention.
Biography
Kyunghyun Cho is an American and South Korean computer scientist and a professor of computer science and data science at New York University's Courant Institute, where he has also been the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics since 2025. Born in Seoul in 1985, he earned a BS in computer science from KAIST in 2009 and a master's and doctor of science from Aalto University in Finland in 2011 and 2014. He was then a postdoc at the Université de Montréal under Yoshua Bengio.
In 2014 he co-authored with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Bengio a paper that introduced neural machine translation and attention, concepts that became highly influential in machine learning. He joined NYU in 2015, was tenured in 2019, was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research from 2017 to 2020, and in 2024 became co-head of NYU's Global AI Frontier Lab with Yann LeCun. Samsung named him AI Researcher of the Year in 2020, and he received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Engineering in 2021.
Notable contributions
Co-introduced neural machine translation with attention
With Dzmitry Bahdanau and Yoshua Bengio, co-authored the 2014 paper that introduced attention for neural machine translation, a concept later central to the transformer.
Co-authored the RNN encoder-decoder
Co-authored the 2014 paper on learning phrase representations with an RNN encoder-decoder for statistical machine translation.
Won the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Engineering
Received the 2021 Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Engineering, one of South Korea's most prestigious academic awards.
Career history
Research scientist at Facebook AI Research
