PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kyuseok Shim

Kyuseok Shim is a Seoul National University computer scientist whose work spans data mining, query processing and machine learning. He earned electrical engineering and computer science degrees, completed a PhD under Timos Sellis, and interned at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. In 1998, he coauthored CURE, an efficient clustering algorithm for large databases; in 2025, he coauthored DP-FROST for privacy-preserving fine-tuning of pre-trained models. He became an ACM Fellow in 2013 and an IEEE Fellow in 2019, served as KIISE president in 2022, and joined Korea's National Academy of Engineering in 2023. As of October 2026, he is a professor and database lab leader at SNU and Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal; he chaired KDD 2026 in Jeju.

Works
196
Citations
16,328
h-index
35
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1986–1993

    Degrees and HP internships

    He earns a BS in electrical engineering at Seoul National University in 1986, an MS in computer science at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1988, and a PhD there under Timos Sellis in 1993. During the summers of 1992 and 1993, he interns at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories with Surajit Chaudhuri.

  2. 1998

    The CURE clustering algorithm

    With Sudipto Guha and Rajeev Rastogi, he coauthors CURE in 1998, an efficient clustering algorithm for large databases that handles outliers and finds non-spherical clusters with varied sizes.

  3. March 2002

    Professor at Seoul National

    In March 2002, he joins Seoul National University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as a professor after an assistant professorship at KAIST. Before joining SNU, he also works at Bell Laboratories and IBM Almaden Research Center.

  4. 2013–2019

    ACM and IEEE Fellowships

    He becomes an ACM Fellow in 2013 for contributions to scalable data mining and query processing. In 2019, he becomes an IEEE Fellow for work on data-mining algorithms for big-data processing and querying, and database-system optimization.

  5. 2022–2023

    KIISE president and academy member

    In 2022, he serves as president of KIISE. In 2023, he becomes a member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea.

  6. 2022–2028

    VLDB editor and SIGKDD director

    He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal from 2022 through 2028. In 2025, he is elected a Director of the ACM SIGKDD Executive Committee for the 2025–2027 term. In 2026, he chairs the KDD conference in Jeju.

  7. 2025

    DP-FROST private fine-tuning

    In 2025, he coauthors DP-FROST, which fine-tunes large pre-trained models for downstream tasks under differential privacy while freezing unimportant parameters.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor and KDD Lab leader

    He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University and leads its Knowledge Discovery and Database Research Laboratory. His research includes data mining, machine learning, privacy preservation and query processing.

Career

  1. Since 2002Seoul National UniversityProfessor
  2. 2022Korean Institute of Information Scientists and EngineersPresident
  3. 2020–2025Ministry of Science and ICT
  4. 2014–2020Korea University
  5. Until 2002Bell Labs
  6. Until 2002IBM Research
  7. 2000–2002KAIST
  8. 1992–1993Hewlett-PackardIntern

Education

  1. 1993University of MarylandPhD
  2. 1988University of MarylandMS in computer science
  3. 1986Seoul National UniversityBS in electrical engineering

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Efficient algorithms for mining outliers from large data sets2000 · ACM SIGMOD Record · 1,908 citations
  2. CURE1998 · ACM-SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data · 1,907 citations
  3. Rock: A robust clustering algorithm for categorical attributes2000 · Information Systems · 1,504 citations
  4. Cure: an efficient clustering algorithm for large databases2001 · Information Systems · 1,012 citations
  5. Fast Similarity Search in the Presence of Noise, Scaling, and Translation in Time-Series Databases1995 · 649 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Kyuseok Shim. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Seoul National University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Seoul National University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Seoul National University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Kyuseok Shim's Home Page kdd.snu.ac.kr. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Kyuseok Shim named 2013 ACM Fellow for contributions to scalable data mining and query processing | UMD Department of Computer Science cs.umd.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. DiSC - SIGMOD Paper Index sigmod.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Professor Kyuseok Shim, elected as an IEEE fellow - News - Notice - Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, SNU ece.snu.ac.kr. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. [ECE Department] Professor Kyuseok Shim elected to the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD—the world’s leading data mining conference—becoming the first Korean to be chosen through a vote of the membership ece.snu.ac.kr. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. DP-FROST: Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Pre-trained Models with Freezing Model Parameters aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.