Prof. Kangwook Lee

Chief AI Officer (CAIO) @ KRAFTON
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) @ Ludo Robotics

Email: kangwooklee at krafton dot com
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(by publication date), (by citation)

I am the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) at KRAFTON and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Ludo Robotics. Previously, I was a (tenured) Associate Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Computer Sciences Department (by courtesy) at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before that, I was a Research Assistant Professor at the Information and Electronics Research Institute of KAIST, working with Prof. Changho Suh. I received my PhD in May 2016 from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley and my Master of Science degree from the same department in December 2012, both under the supervision of Prof. Kannan Ramchandran. I was a member of the BLISS lab and the BASiCS group. I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from KAIST in May 2010, working with Prof. Sae-Young Chung and Prof. Yung Yi.

machine learning, deep learning, information theory, and coding

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of California, Berkeley, 2010.08 - 2016.5
- Major: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Master of Science (MS), University of California, Berkeley, 2010.08 - 2012.12
- Major: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Bachelor of Science (BS), KAIST, 2006.03 - 2010.05
- Major: Electrical Engineering

Outstanding Paper Award, The 5th Wordplay Workshop @ EMNLP 2025
Fusion Fund Distinguished Scholar Network, Inaugural Member, 2025
NSF CAREER Award, 2024.
Amazon Research Awards, 2024.
Best Paper Award, The Federated Learning Systems (FLSys) Workshop @ MLSys 2023
ECE Grainger Faculty Scholarship Award, 2022, UW Madison ECE.
Young Investigator Grants Award, 2022, KSEA. (link)
The Joint Communications Society/Information Theory Society Paper Award, 2020, IEEE. (link)
The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, 2016. (link)
Best Paper Award Finalist, 2013, IEEE MASCOTS 2013
KFAS Fellowship, 2010 - 2015, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS)
Graduated with the highest GPA (4.19/4.30) among all (> 800) students across all departments at KAIST who completed their degrees in 2010 (both Spring and Fall semesters).
(Presidential Award) Korea Talent Award (대한민국 인재상), 2009, Korea Foundation for Advancement of Science & Creativity (KOFAC)

Conference Senior Program Committee
- Area Chair, NeurIPS 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021
- Area Chair, ICML 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023
- Area Chair, ICLR 2026, 2025
- Area Chair, COLM 2026, 2025, 2024
- Program Committee, MLSys 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020
Journal Associate Editor
- Action Editor, Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022