Sungkyunkwan University, a Samsung strategic academic partner, signs on as EdgeCloud customer to…

Sungkyunkwan University, a Samsung strategic academic partner, signs on as EdgeCloud customer to accelerate Multimodal AI Research

We’re excited to announce that Sungkyunkwan University’s AI & Media Lab (AIM Lab), led by Professor Sungeun Hong, has become the 32nd academic institution worldwide to adopt Theta EdgeCloud, the leading decentralized GPU infrastructure built for AI and machine learning research. This collaboration enables the AIM Lab to accelerate advanced research in multimodal learning, domain adaptation, 3D vision, and human-AI alignment, including such work as their Samsung-supported paper “Question-Aware Gaussian Experts for Audio-Visual Question Answering” — recently accepted as a Highlight Paper at CVPR 2025. The research will be presented this June in Nashville at one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences.

By adopting Theta EdgeCloud into its infrastructure, the AIM Lab will further enhance its work in vision-language modeling, robotic perception, and privacy-preserving domain transfer. Theta’s decentralized architecture provides on-demand, high-performance GPU resources, empowering researchers to iterate faster while minimizing compute resource usage and cost.

Professor Sungeun Hong, a former research scientist at SK Telecom’s T-Brain AI Center, is now an Associate Professor at Sungkyunkwan University in the Department of Immersive Media Engineering, where he leads the AI & Media Lab. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from KAIST, and his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Hanyang University. Professor Hong is widely recognized for his pioneering work in multimodal AI, domain adaptation, and robot vision. His lab consistently publishes in top international venues such as CVPR, ICCV, and INTERSPEECH, and in leading journals including Pattern Recognition, Neural Networks, and Neurocomputing.

“Theta EdgeCloud is now the clear leader in decentralized GPU infrastructure for research institutions worldwide. We’re excited to get the computing flexibility and scale we need to push the boundaries of multimodal AI,” said Professor Sungeun Hong, Director of the AI & Media Lab at SKKU. “From 3D vision to robot perception, Theta enables us to train and evaluate models more rapidly and cost-effectively. This will be game changing for our research lab.”

Samsung-Supported Research Earns Global Spotlight

Sungkyunkwan University maintains a deep and strategic relationship with Samsung Group, South Korea’s largest conglomerate and a key supporter of SKKU’s AI research ecosystem. Two recent research outcomes from the AI & Media Lab, both supported by Samsung, have garnered international recognition.

The first, titled “Question-Aware Gaussian Experts for Audio-Visual Question Answering”, presents a novel method for dynamic audio-visual fusion using question-adaptive Gaussian experts. The work will be showcased at CVPR 2025, taking place June 11–15 in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the world’s top AI and computer vision conferences.

The second Samsung-supported paper, “Memory-Efficient Cross-Modal Attention for RGB-X Segmentation and Crowd Counting”, was recently published in the prestigious journal Pattern Recognition. The paper introduces a memory-efficient attention mechanism for multimodal image segmentation, with practical implications in robotics and smart infrastructure.

Together, these achievements demonstrate the AIM Lab’s world-class research output and reflect the strong academic–corporate synergy between SKKU and Samsung in developing socially impactful AI technologies.

Theta EdgeCloud: Powering Global AI Research at Scale

Through this partnership, Sungkyunkwan University joins a distinguished group of institutions leveraging Theta EdgeCloud, including Stanford University, Seoul National University, KAIST, University of Oregon, NTU Singapore, Brandeis University, and dozens others. With access to high-performance decentralized GPU resources, the AIM Lab can accelerate large-scale training of vision-language models, run real-time robotics experiments, and deploy multimodal AI systems in real-world applications.

This collaboration unites SKKU with global leaders advancing AI innovation, all connected through Theta’s scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure designed for next-generation research and deployment.

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