As one of SFU's most outstanding graduate students from the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Dr. Hyomin Choi is recognized with the Governor General’s Gold Convocation Medal. On behalf of SFU, we congratulate Dr. Choi on his outstanding achievements.

As a gifted master’s student, Dr. Hyomin Choi had multiple schools offering him placements for his PhD program. Choi chose to come to SFU from Korea to pursue his studies in artificial intelligence-based video codec research. His pioneering work includes three-dimensional feature tensor compression for efficient machine-to-machine communication and AI-based scalable video compression to assist humans and machines’ visual consumption of video data in a scalable manner.

He is published in 18 international journals and conferences and has filed US patent applications on the technology he’s developed. His Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the most prestigious doctoral scholarship in the fields of natural sciences and engineering in Canada, was ranked fifth in Canada. His work has not only received top awards in many top conferences, but he’s also producing pioneering work that is being adopted as international standards in the field.

Choi’s research on the topic of coding for object detection was one of the inspirations for establishing Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) activity on Video Coding for Machines (VCM) MPEG-VCM. He also led the development of one of the datasets (now known as the SFU-HW dataset) which has been adopted into the MPEG-VCM test pipeline. The future MPEG-VCM standard will be decided in part based on how well the algorithms perform on this dataset that he inspired and also created.

Most importantly, his ground-breaking work on the topic of coding for machines was the information-theoretic proof that features in a deep learning model are more compressible than the input signal, resulting in the theoretical justification for the entire field of coding for machines.

Choi’s supervisor, Dr. Ivan V. Bajić, confirms that Choi is an incredible researcher and deserving of this honour. Says Bajić, “Hyomin is an exceptional researcher. He is not simply a highly published and accomplished researcher – with many papers, standards contributions, and already over 900 citations – but a research thought leader whose ideas are being adopted and extended by many others. In scientific research, it does not get much better than that.”

Says Choi, "I am deeply honoured to have received the most prestigious award granted by Canadian universities. I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my senior supervisor, Prof. Ivan V. Bajić, for his unwavering support and invaluable advice throughout my entire PhD journey. The fruitful outcomes of my research undoubtedly stem from our strong collaboration and mutual trust."

Choi now works for Silicon Valley’s InterDigital as a research scientist, continuing his research on AI-based video compression to include international standardization activities for video compression technology