Kyunghyun Cho

Kyunghyun Cho (; born 1985) is an American and South Korean computer scientist. He is a professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University's Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science. He has also been the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics since 2025.

Cho is a researcher in machine learning, especially deep learning. He was a coauthor on a 2014 paper that introduced neural machine translation.

Biography Cho was born in 1985 in South Korea to father Kyu-Ick Cho , a professor of Korean literature at Soongsil University, and mother Im Mi-Sook, a Korean language teacher. His mother retired from teaching to focus on raising Cho and his younger brother. with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Bengio that introduced neural machine translation and attention for neural networks, concepts that have since become highly influential in machine learning. In 2025, he was made the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics by the Courant Institute.

Awards In 2020, he was named AI Researcher of the Year by the South Korean company Samsung. In 2021, he received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for Engineering, one of South Korea's most prestigious awards for academics.

Philanthropy Cho donated the $30,000 he received with Samsung AI Researcher of the Year award to the research institute Mila to support female students studying computer science from abroad.

The Ho-Am Prize came with prize money of ₩300 million (before taxes; around $). Cho donated much of this money to establish several scholarships and awards. Cho donated ₩100 million ($) each to KAIST to establish a Lim Mi-Sook Scholarship , which is named for his mother and meant to support female engineers. Another ₩100 million was spent to establish a Baek-Gyu Award for Scholarly Award for Classics. The award, named in honor of the art name of his literature scholar father, is for researchers in Korean classical literature and art.