AI Academic Reputation Professor Yoon Sung-ro's Research Team Faces Plagiarism Allegations in Over 10 First-Author Papers
Professor Yoon Admits "It's Plagiarism... Used Existing Papers Without Reflecting Co-authors' Submitted Content"
[Asia Economy Reporter Heo Kyung-jun] An artificial intelligence (AI) research team led by Professor Yoon Seong-ro of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University recently admitted to submitting a plagiarized paper to an overseas AI conference and withdrew the paper.
According to Seoul National University on the 25th, Professor Yoon's research team submitted a paper titled "A Method for Rapid Reconstruction of Asynchronous Events into Persistent Video Images through Neural Network Stochastic Differential Equations" to the '2022 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)' held in the United States from the 19th to the 24th.
The paper attracted attention at the conference, but it was revealed that the English paper contained a large amount of plagiarized content, which the authors acknowledged. A doctoral student at Seoul National University was the first author.
Corresponding author Professor Yoon and other co-authors, after being pointed out and confirming the plagiarism, expressed their intention to withdraw the paper to the conference organizers and requested Seoul National University, their affiliated institution, to initiate disciplinary committee proceedings.
Accordingly, the conference organizers and Seoul National University have launched an official investigation. CVPR is jointly hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest engineering professional organization, and the Computer Vision Foundation (CVF), and is considered the most prestigious conference in the AI field. Professor Yoon is a highly respected scholar in the AI academic community and has served as the chairman of the Private-Public Joint 4th Industrial Revolution Committee since February 2021.
This paper was selected as an outstanding paper at the CVPR 2022 conference and was published as an open access version. It was also orally presented by the first author at the conference held recently in New Orleans, USA.
Only up to 4% of all papers are selected for oral presentation at CVPR 2022. The plagiarism allegations were posted on YouTube the day before. The video raised suspicions that this paper plagiarized more than ten domestic and international papers published between 2018 and 2021.
In a phone call with the media on the same day, Professor Yoon admitted, "It is plagiarism," and explained, "A paper is not written by one person alone but by dividing roles among several people and compiling parts. The first author who compiled the paper did not properly reflect the content submitted by other co-authors and instead copied existing published papers."
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