PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Honglak Lee

Also known as H.-A. Lee

Honglak Lee is a machine-learning researcher and AI lab leader whose work spans representation learning, image generation and reinforcement learning. He earned a physics and computer science degree from Seoul National University in 2003, completed a Stanford Ph.D. under Andrew Ng and was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan by 2013. His 2009 ICML paper on convolutional deep belief networks won ICML's Best Application Paper award; later work includes a GAN for generating images from text in 2016 and the Value Prediction Network in 2017. He joined LG AI Research as Chief Scientist of AI in 2020 and became a co-head in 2025; as of October 2026, he is its Head and Chief AI Scientist.

Timeline

  1. 2003

    A degree from Seoul National University

    He earns a B.S. in physics and computer science from Seoul National University in 2003.

  2. 2009

    Convolutional deep belief networks

    He coauthors Convolutional deep belief networks for scalable unsupervised learning of hierarchical representations at ICML in 2009. The paper wins ICML's Best Application Paper award.

  3. By 2013

    An assistant professor at Michigan

    By 2013, he is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan after earning a computer science Ph.D. at Stanford under Andrew Ng. His work includes deep learning and unsupervised feature learning for computer vision, audio recognition and text processing.

  4. 2016

    Images from text with GANs

    In 2016, he coauthors Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis with Scott Reed and four other authors. The paper's deep architecture and GAN formulation generate plausible images of birds and flowers from detailed text descriptions.

  5. 2017

    The Value Prediction Network

    In 2017, he coauthors the Value Prediction Network, which combines model-free and model-based reinforcement learning in one neural network. The model's abstract states predict future values and outperforms DQN on several Atari games with short-lookahead planning.

  6. 2020

    Chief Scientist at LG AI Research

    In 2020, LG launches its AI research institute and recruits Lee as Chief Scientist of AI. He is a professor at the University of Michigan and a research scientist at Google Brain.

  7. As of October 2026

    Leading LG AI Research

    In 2025, he becomes a co-head of LG AI Research alongside Woohyung Lim. As of October 2026, he is Head and Chief AI Scientist of the institute.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Honglak Lee yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Honglak Lee web.eecs.umich.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Honglak Lee web.eecs.umich.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Unsupervised Feature Learning cs.nyu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Learning Representations from Data cse.snu.ac.kr. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Value Prediction Network arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. LG launches artificial intelligence think tank 'LG AI Research' lgcorp.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Opening the Next Chapter with New Leadership, an Interview with Honglak Lee and Woohyung Lim, Co-Heads of LG AI Research lgresearch.ai. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. LG AI Talk Concert 2026: ‘Expert AI’ Solving Complex Industrial Challenges lgresearch.ai. Checked 19 October 2026.