Hyunwoo Nam, a master's student in POSTECH's Department of Electrical Engineering advised by Professor Tae-Hyun Oh, won Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2021 (QIFK 2021), with a KRW 4 million award. Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship is a global Qualcomm program; QIFK identifies outstanding research in AI, machine learning, and autonomous driving and awards scholarships. Nam was selected from many candidates for his research on communication-efficient federated learning of deep learning models.

Nam proposed low-rank Hadamard product factorization, a new parameterization of neural network layers, and analyzed its theoretical properties to improve memory and communication efficiency while preserving performance. His solution improves training speed by up to approximately tenfold even under poor network conditions while maintaining performance.

The Algorithmic Machine Intelligence Laboratory, including Nam and led by Professor Oh, was selected this year for the National Research Foundation of Korea's First Innovative Laboratory program based on its AI research. It also received approximately KRW 450 million over three years through an outstanding early-career research project on video motion analysis.

Oh was appointed concurrently this year as the head of a RIST–POSCO Open Lab research team, leading video motion amplification research. His active research service includes appointment as Associate Editor of The Visual Computer (impact factor 2.6), appointment to the Program Committee Board of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and invitation as a Senior Program Committee member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).