Naver Expands R&D Organization to the US... Strengthening 'Global Research' Function

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] Naver has decided to strengthen its R&D (Research and Development) network in the North American region by recruiting outstanding domestic and international developers, focusing on Silicon Valley in the United States.

Naver announced this plan at the ‘2021 Naver Search Colloquium Global Re:Search’ held online on the 7th.

To this end, Naver recently recruited Jin-Young Kim as a lead researcher. After earning a Ph.D. in information retrieval in the U.S., Lead Researcher Kim has worked on evaluation and user modeling of search and recommendation systems at Microsoft (MS) and Snap.

He plans to recruit developers locally in the U.S. and expand Naver’s R&D network. The organization led by Lead Researcher Kim is open to applicants regardless of nationality, and employees can choose to work in Korea or the U.S.

Lead Researcher Kim said, "We aim to apply the latest research cases from various fields of data science to Naver’s diverse search and recommendation services and improve services and achieve results based on this." He added, "At a time when Naver is positioning itself as a global service, I hope talented individuals from home and abroad will join us."

At the event, Naver also announced its research and development achievements and plans to strengthen its global research network. The presentation was given by Inho Kang, lead researcher of Naver Search CIC.

Lead Researcher Kang introduced academic achievements related to Naver Search, saying, "At ICASSP 2021, the world’s largest conference in acoustic and speech signal processing, 14 papers were accepted; at CVPR 2020, a conference in computer vision and deep learning, 7 papers were accepted; and at ACL and EMNLP, conferences in natural language processing, 6 papers were accepted last year."

He continued, "Last year, we presented more than 40 papers at global top-tier conferences, demonstrating our recognized research capabilities in search and AI," and explained, "This is an increase of more than 11 times compared to when the Naver Search Colloquium first started in 2016."

Lead Researcher Kang also expressed expectations for the future growth potential of AI technology applied to search services. He said, "Currently, we provide personalized search results through AI-based product recommendation system ‘AiTEMS’, place recommendation system ‘AiRSPACE’, and content recommendation system ‘AiRS’," adding, "Regarding AI search tools, usage increased by more than 24% in April compared to January this year through continuous usability improvements."

He added, "By applying deep learning models represented by BERT and large-scale generative language model GPT-3 across all search service areas, performance improvements have become possible in various languages besides Korean," and said, "Naver’s technology and know-how will be sufficiently competitive in the global market."

Meanwhile, the Naver Search Colloquium is an academic event established in 2016 with the goal of sharing research collaboration status between Naver researchers and academia to lead progressive projects. For the past three years, it was held under the name ‘AI Colloquium’, but from this year, it has been held again under the name ‘Search Colloquium’.