Sebastian Seung

Hyunjune Sebastian Seung (English: /sung/ or [səŋ]; ) was president at Samsung Research (Samsung Electronics) and is an Anthony B. Evnin Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science. Seung has done influential research in both computer science and neuroscience. He has helped pioneer the new field of connectomics, "developing new computational technologies for mapping the connections between neurons," and has been described as the cartographer of the brain.

Since 2014, he has been a professor in computer science and neuroscience at Princeton University's Neuroscience Institute at the Jeff Bezos Center in Neural Dynamics, where he directs the Seung Labs. Before, he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a full professor in computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and as a professor in physics.

In the industry, he was a research scientist at the Bell Labs and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Since 2015, he has joined the board of advisors for Nara Logics, an MIT-based startup specializing in brain research and big data. Since 2018, he was hired as the Chief Research Scientist at Samsung.

He is most well known as a proponent of connectomics through his Ted talk "I am my Connectome" and his book Connectome which was named top 10 nonfiction books of the year 2012 by the Wall Street Journal and has been translated into dozens of languages.

He founded EyeWire, an online computer game that mobilizes social computing and machine learning on a mission to map the human brain. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of users from over a hundred countries, and it has recently partnered with KT Corporation to help spread the scientific mission and attract more players to the cause.

Seung is also known for his 1999 and 2000 joint works on non-negative matrix factorization, an important algorithm used in AI and data science.

Biography Seung was born in New York, NY. His father T. K. Seung/Thomas Seung/T.K. Swing was a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and Korean-American immigrant who escaped North Korea as a teenager.

During his Ph.D. studies he briefly interned at the Bell Labs in 1989. There he was introduced to the mathematical problem of neural networks.

The Connectome Theory The connectome is the map of the 100 trillion plus neural connections within the brain. Its name is based on the same way the genome is a map of a species' DNA. In simplest mathematical terms, it can be thought of as a graph network. Seung focuses on the potential implications of the Human Connectome Project and what it would mean to map the connectome of a human brain. He has popularized the connectome theory through his 2010 TED Conference speech titled “I Am My Connectome” as well as through his 2012 book Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are.

He proposes that every memory, skill, and passion is encoded somehow in the connectome. And when the brain is not wired properly it can result in mental disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Understanding the human connectome may not only help cure such diseases with treatments but also possibly help doctors prevent them from occurring in the first place. And if we can represent the sum of all human experiences and memories in the connectome, then we can download human brains on to flash drives, save them indefinitely, and replay those memories in the future, thereby granting humans a kind of immortality.

Seung proposes that a connectome is like a riverbed. As the water of a river, neural activity is constantly changing, never staying still. The connectome is the riverbed which both guides the neural activity while also being shaped by the water over time. Illustrating how thinking and neural activity alters the connectome adding to the difficulty of mapping the human connectome that is constantly changing.

Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are In his 2012 book Connectome, Seung discusses his current views on neuroscience and the upcoming science of connectomics. The book expands on some of the concepts discussed in his Ted talk as well as discussing how the doctrine of the connectome can be tested. He states that in order to test and further our knowledge and unlock to potential of the connectome we must improve the scientific tools in existence. Also, he states that there needs to be new ways to promote the concept of the connectome using the four R's: reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration. Thus far site has recruited over 130,000 players from over 100 countries. , utilized this mapped connectome to predict functions , and mapped part of the mouse connectome . He is collaborating with several scientists to reconstruct more fly connectomes with Mala Murthy, expand the mouse connectome with ophthalmologist Thomas Euler, explore murine memory with David Tank, decision making with Adrian Wanner and Jeff Lichtman, and utilizing reinforcement learning to understand connectomes with Ilana Witten.

Publications and books Seung has published multiple articles, over 15 in 2025 alone.

As aforementioned, he authored the book Connectome (2012). It has been translated into at least 26 languages.

Awards and honors He has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow, and a McKnight Scholar; he also won the Ho-Am Prize in Engineering in 2008. He has been named top 10 non-fiction authors by the WSJ for his book Connectome. He is an External Member for the Max Planck Society.

Teaching Seung has delivered lectures on how neurons might be wired together to form the engines of thought around the world.

In the past few years, he has been teaching Princeton's COS 485 Neural Networks, a course taken by both undergraduates and graduate students.

Personal life He currently lives with his wife and 3 daughters.