Builders & open source
Kyunghyun Cho
Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics; Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, NYU
- Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics; Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, New York University1
- Co-Founder and CEO, Ortet, Inc.1
Kyunghyun Cho is the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics and a professor of computer science and data science at New York University, where Cho co-directs the Global Frontier AI Lab with Yann LeCun, and is a co-founder and CEO of Ortet. Cho was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research from June 2017 to May 2020, co-founded Prescient Design in early 2021, and served at Genentech as Executive Director of Frontier Research and a Senior Fellow until January 2026. Cho is first author of the 2014 paper proposing the RNN Encoder-Decoder for statistical machine translation and a co-author, with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Yoshua Bengio, of Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. Cho was a founding Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Machine Learning Research until 2024.123
At a glance
- Current roles
- Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics; Professor of Computer Science and Data Science +1 more
- Companies
- NYU, Ortet, Inc.
- Sector
- University
- Fields
- Language models, AI for science
- Education
- NYU, Montréal
- Work listed
- 2
- Honors
- 3
- Sources cited
- 6
- Profile reviewed
Career
Cho earned MSc and DSc degrees at Aalto University in 2011 and 2014, supervised by Juha Karhunen, Tapani Raiko and Alexander Ilin, with a doctoral thesis titled "Foundations and Advances in Deep Learning". Cho was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal under Yoshua Bengio until summer 2015, before joining New York University.1
From June 2017 to May 2020 Cho was also a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. In early 2021 Cho co-founded Prescient Design, which Genentech acquired later that year, and served at Genentech as Executive Director of Frontier Research and a Senior Fellow until January 2026. Cho is now co-founder and CEO of Ortet and co-directs NYU's Global Frontier AI Lab with Yann LeCun.1
Research
In 2014 Cho published several papers on neural machine translation. As first author, Cho proposed the RNN Encoder-Decoder for learning phrase representations, and a companion paper studied the properties of neural machine translation with encoder-decoder models. With Dzmitry Bahdanau and Yoshua Bengio, Cho co-authored the paper that introduced jointly learning to align and translate, in which the model learns to soft-search for the parts of a source sentence relevant to predicting each target word.243
Cho co-authored "Show, Attend and Tell" (2015), which applied visual attention to generating image captions, and in 2015 posted lecture notes for the NYU Center for Data Science course on natural language understanding with distributed representations.56
Service
Cho served as a program chair or co-chair of ICLR 2020, ICML 2022 and NeurIPS 2022, and on the boards of ICML and ICLR. Cho was one of three founding Editors-in-Chief of Transactions on Machine Learning Research, serving until 2024.1
Work and contributions
RNN Encoder-Decoder Published research
First author of Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation (2014), which proposes a model of two recurrent networks that encode a sequence into a fixed-length vector and decode it into another sequence.2
Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate Published research
Co-author with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Yoshua Bengio of the 2014 paper on jointly learning to align and translate in neural machine translation.3
Timeline
- Received a DSc from Aalto University with the thesis "Foundations and Advances in Deep Learning".1
- Posted the RNN Encoder-Decoder paper for statistical machine translation as first author.2
- Co-authored "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate".3
- Co-authored "Show, Attend and Tell" on image captioning with visual attention.5
- Joined Facebook AI Research as a research scientist, serving until May 2020.1
- Served as a program chair of ICLR 2020.1
- Co-founded Prescient Design, which Genentech acquired later in 2021.1
- Concluded service at Genentech as Executive Director of Frontier Research and Senior Fellow.1
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.
- Research Scientist, Facebook AI Research (June 2017 – May 2020), Meta (Facebook AI Research)1
- Executive Director of Frontier Research and Senior Fellow (until January 2026), Genentech1
- Co-founder (early 2021), Prescient Design1
- Postdoctoral fellow with Yoshua Bengio (until summer 2015), Université de Montréal1
Honors and recognition
Where they work
- NYU 12 people in the wiki
- Ortet, Inc. 1 person in the wiki
Related people
- Saadia GabrielAlso at NYU
- Gilles LouppeAlso at NYU
- Samuel R. BowmanAlso at NYU
- Graham TaylorAlso at NYU
- Tom SchaulAlso at NYU
- David WaddenLanguage models · AI for science
- Yejin ChoiLanguage models · AI for science
- Hoifung PoonAI for science · Language models
- Liam FedusLanguage models · AI for science
- Brian HieAI for science · Language models
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References
6 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026
- Kyunghyun Cho — About me (homepage)
- Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation (arXiv 1406.1078)
- Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (arXiv 1409.0473)
- On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches (arXiv 1409.1259)
- Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention (arXiv 1502.03044)
- Natural Language Understanding with Distributed Representation (arXiv 1511.07916)