Brain x Machine Intelligence Lab

Brain x Machine Intelligence Lab @ KAIST

Laboratory for brain and machine intelligence, KAIST

Sang Wan Lee (이상완)

Director,
KAIST Center for Neuroscience-inspired Artificial Intelligence
Associate professor,
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
Adjunct professor,
Department of Bio & Brain Engineering,
Graduate School of Data Science,
Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Affiliated Faculty, New York University (NYU)

Biosketch

I am a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at KAIST. I hold joint appointments in the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, the Graduate School of Data Science, and the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI. As the founding director of the KAIST Center for Neuroscience-inspired Artificial Intelligence, I lead initiatives bridging neuroscience and AI research. Additionally, I serve as an affiliated faculty member at New York University since 2025.

I received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from KAIST in 2009 (Ph.D. supervisor: Zeungnam Bien). I was a postdoctoral associate at MIT (advisor: Tomaso Poggio), followed by a Della Martin postdoctoral scholar at Caltech (advisor: John O'Doherty and Shinsuke Shimojo).

I received the Google Faculty Research Award (2016) and IBM Academic Award (2021). I also won a few awards from KAIST, including KAIST Songam Distinguished Research Award (2019), KAIST Institute Faculty Award (2019), KAIST International Cooperation Award (2022), and KAIST Global Research Collaboration Award (2023). Our lab was selected as a SW StarLab in AI (2023) by the Ministry of Science and ICT, Korea.

My research focuses on understanding how the brain learns and makes inferences. To address this question, I have put together ideas from AI and computational neuroscience. The approach is two-fold: 1) “Brain↦AI” aimed at understanding how the brain learns from an AI standpoint, and 2) “AI↦Brain” aimed at understanding why such neural processes occur.

(CV(out of date), Google scholar citations, and Neurotree)

Awards

  • IBM Academic Award (2021)

  • Google Faculty Research Award (2016)

  • KAIST Global Research Collaboration Award (2023)

  • KAIST International Cooperation Award (2022)

  • KAIST Songam Distinguished Research Award (2019)

  • KAIST Institute Faculty Award (2019)

  • KIIS Young Investigator Award (2016)

  • ICROS Young Investigator Award (2016)

Book (in Korean)

Newspaper opinion (in Korean)

Interviews/public lecture examples (in Korean)

Meetup

  • Office hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00-12:00

  • Other meetings: by appointment only. Please sign up HERE ("Student meeting" tap).

sw_talk (internal)