On March 16, LG TECH CONFERENCE 2023 was held to showcase LG technologies and meet with outstanding R&D talent at the LG Science Park! LG Tech Conference, which began in 2012, has been a platform to meet with talented individuals from various fields in Korea and the US to introduce the state and vision of technological innovations. This year, our AI researchers actively participated in the conference. 
(3 seconds before the opening of the conference! Very exciting!)
The event was opened by a video portraying the future created to show LG’s journey that started from its very own curiosity. The slogan of LG TECH CONFERENCE 2023, “Find yourself, Find your future”, was emphasized in hopes for attendees to discover their own path through the conference by asking themselves what kind of curiosity brought them to the conference (our AI artist Tilda also stopped by to welcome attendees! )
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(Tilda also made a stop to welcome the attendees!)
(CLOi, wearing an LG Tech Conference hoodie, also made an appearance)
A very special guest made a surprise visit at the opening ceremony(drumroll), who was…
Kwang-mo Koo, the Cheif Executive of LG Corporation! He delivered a warm welcome to the attendees himself
During the event, Kwang-mo Koo introduced a drawing made with the keywords “dream, future, and people,” stating that “LG’s dream is to create a world where everyone smiles by bringing happiness to people’s lives and turning our imaginations into a better future.” He emphasized that “‘technology and innovation’ and the ‘people and talent’ are invaluable for fulfilling this dream, which has been the principle cherished throughout LG’s history of over 75 years!” It was a moving moment as he sincerely conveyed to attendees that he “hopes [attendees] bear greater fruit born from concerns of your dreams and growth, and hope LG can join you on the journey.”
There were 37 Tech Sessions at the LG TECH CONFERENCE 2023 that involved introducing the technology and vision of nine companies, including LG AI Research.
From LG AI Research, Seunghwan Kim, the head of Vision Lab, presented “LG’s Multimodal Expert AI Research”
“EXAONE, the multimodal AI developed by LG AI Research, has bidirectional features of generating images based on the input text and producing text that gives detailed descriptions for the input image. In this year’s Tech Session, the distinctive technology of EXAONE in image-to-text and text-to-image generation was explained.
Existing image captioning models struggle to process images beyond the scope of their training data, but EXAONE’s training dataset consists of more than 350 million images with diverse image types, such as photos, illustrations, and graphics. The datasets also include text describing each image as well as detailed information about the images. Understanding of text also gratly improved by using UniCLIP, a multimodal representation model presented at NeurIPS last year, and the EXAONE language model as text encoders! Seunghwan confidently shared the research capabilities of LG AI Research, as we are developing technologies that can not only generate images from text, but also allow users to create the images in the style they prefer with various inputs.
Seunghwan confidently shared the research capabilities of LG AI Research, as we are developing technologies that can not only generate images from text, but also allow users to create the images in the style they prefer with various inputs. 
Sehui Han, the head of Materials Intelligence Lab, then presented the topic “How could AI transform chemical research?”
First, Sehui introduced the DDU technology that gathers material data by reading the chemical structural formulas and table data in papers. Chemical structural formulas in papers that are often referenced in the chemistry field and patents must be converted into a format that is understandable by computers through vision models, as well as into a format that we can utilize again by reading the information in tables. After nearly two years of research, LG AI Research created a model that extracts content based on languages in the chemical biomedical field at a global state-of-the-art (SOTA) level in competitions!
The collected material data is utilized to train the model of molecular design. The key goal is to extract the decision-making logic through the AI model as the structure determines the properties. Collecting and training with a large volume of structure and property data allows the model to acquire the logic. Once the properties are determined from the structure, it is only a matter of time to create a new structure by adding the desired properties. With this technology, LG AI Research reduced the development process from about 3.5 years to an impressive 8 months! (How incredible! Kudos to our researchers! )
)The remarkable research by LG AI Research was highlighted once again during the Tech Session.
If anyone is interested in joining our research to create meaningful values with our outstanding colleagues, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Talent Relations Team
(Many people were interested in the AI Deep Dive- Poster Session)
(Vision Lab researcher, passionately explaining )
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(Advanced ML Lab also joined!)
In addition to Tech Sessions, Posters were also presented. Many people attended and engaged in lively discussion at the open session, where authors introduced diverse topics in LG AI research including papers recently accepted at international academic conferences.
LG AI Research prepared 10 research topics1) L-Verse: Bidirectional Generation Between Image and Text [CVPR22]
2) On the Angular Update and Hyperparameter Tuning of a Scale-Invariant Network (ECCV 22)
3) Korean-Specific Dataset for Table Question Answering [LREC22]
4) Symbolic Music Loop Generation with Neural Discrete Representations [ISMIR22]
5) Context aware Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction with Domain specific language model [CLEF22]
6) Transformers meet Stochastic Block Models: Attention with Data-Adaptive Sparsity and Cost [NeurIPS22]
7) Transferring Pre-trained Multimodal Representations with Cross-modal Similarity Matching [NeurIPS22]
8) CEDe: A collection of expert-curated datasets with atom-level entity annotations for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition [NeurIPS22]
9) UniCLIP: Unified Framework for Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training [NeurIPS22]
10) Grouping-matrix based Graph Pooling with Adaptive Number of Clusters [AAAI23]
Check out more papers from LG AI Research on the Publication List()There were various events for guests at LG TECH CONFERENCE 2023 in addition to the Tech Session. This included the opportunity to meet with senior researchers and space to experience and try LG technologies! Let’s look into each event.
(Our amazing researchers conducted consultations all day long )
)The first event was Ask Anything! Senior researchers and HR managers from nine companies came together as talented individuals from various research fields gathered for the conference! Through the conference Q&A, guests had time to ask senior researchers questions and learn about research trends and the work environment. We also had a wonderful and meaningful time meeting new people, introducing AI Research, and providing employment consultations!
The highlight of the event, Tech Conference Club Room was a creatively decorated space inspired by university club rooms that prepared various entertaining elements for the opportunity to try LG technologies
LG AI Research carried out an AI drawing event using EXAONE’s text-to-image generation technology where the AI creates images from the provided text! We first introduced EXAONE’s technology and explained the algorithm behind the technology. Then we picked out the best images among the 16 generated images with the invited participants and printed them out to give to the participants as gifts. We were proud to see everyone enjoying the images, which were the perfect size with vibrant colors for remembering the event. 
(Introducing text-to-image generation!)
(Do you see the many photo cards posted on the wall?)
In addition to the AI drawing prepared by LG AI Research, there was other diverse entertainment including the tattoo printer by LG Household & Health Care, an RC car experience zone created in collaboration with LG and Geekble, a game zone to experience OLED screen by LG Electronics and LG Display, as well a CNS logistics robot which kept all visitors busy during the conference.
(LG Household & Health Care’s IMPRINTU)
(Mini Goldstar Arcade)
)(If you haven’t seen Geekble’s tour of the LG Tech Conference 2023, click here!)
The final event of the conference, the networking session with delicious food and beverages, was an opportunity to freely network with Tech Session speakers! Participants shared their thoughts from the Tech Session, asked questions, and expanded their perspectives through introductions about research fields or companies they weren’t familiar with.
(A delightful scene of networking)
We also took some time to listen to participants about their day and their impressions of the conference! It was a proud moment for employees given their hard work to prepare the event when participants shared what they saw and experienced from their perspectives, including having greater anticipation for joining as an invited industry-academia scholarship students and amazement in how LG’s diverse technologies are embedded in everyday life.
(Everyone paid close attention to the valuable interview)
We also can’t forget the prize giveaways for an event like this! The invited participants actually had a small mission: a sticker tour event in hopes that they could fully enjoy the event throughout the day! Participants could receive one sticker at a time after attending the Tech Session and experiencing LG technologies. When they collected all five stickers, they were eligible to participate in the prize giveaway.
The prizes included StanbyME, CineBeam, AeroFurniture, a mini wine cellar, and a Courtyard hotel voucher! (I really wanted these too!) Cheers and excitement burst here and there after each drawing as the raffle proceeded full of joyful laughter. Congratulations to all the winners!
(Everyone was full of excitement when prizes appeared on the screen!)
(Announcer Jeon Seo-hyun carefully drawing the raffle )
)As a conclusion to the networking session, participants were shown a video montage of the conference. Participants were invited on-site for interviews, and everything from Tech Sessions to exhibitions and experience events was captured to commemorate the event. Interviews were also included with researchers who themselves were former invited participants at past LG Tech Conferences, now having since joined LG! Messages of support were given to the invited participants through deeply meaningful interviews.
Messages of support were given to the invited participants through deeply meaningful interviews.(Montage video that vividly captured the LG TECH CONFERENCE 2023 )
)Everyone was bustling all day long from morning to night. It was a fulfilling day full of technological exchange and networking! Please look forward to the next year’s event as we’ll be back with another exciting and entertaining event.
We’ll end the post here! Hope everyone has a happy and warm spring!
We’ll end the post here! Hope everyone has a happy and warm spring!