Portrait of Eric (Se Hyun) Chun

“Currently, I am working under Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards program. My role in this program is to use machine learning tools to understand the behavior of the materials from data generated by laboratory and computer experiments.” 

Hometown: Busan, South Korea

Year: Third-year PhD student

Program: Industrial and Systems Engineering

Mission Areas: Advanced Manufacturing and Materials, Biotechnology, Human Modeling and Simulation

Lab: Visual Intelligence Laboratory

Advisor: Stephen Baek, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering

What brought you to the Iowa Technology Institute?

While I was studying as an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa, I met Professor Baek and had an opportunity to discuss his research. I had a shared interest in geometry and shape analysis and decided to join his laboratory and start my PhD program.

What achievements are you most proud of? 

I am proud of my recent paper, "Deep learning for synthetic microstructure generation in a materials-by-design framework for heterogeneous energetic materials," which has been published in Nature's Scientific Reports. This work has gained a lot of attention from the computation mechanics community and has been featured in Nature Research Communities. 

Is there anything else you would like us to know? 

Before my recent paper published in Scientific Reports, I also presented a paper entitled "NADS-Net: A Nimble Architecture for Driver and Seat Belt Detection via Convolutional Neural Networks" in the autonomous driving workshop at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2019), which is one of the most prestigious conferences in computer vision and artificial intelligence.