L&S is proud to welcome dozens of new faculty members this year, across each of our four divisions. Our New Faculty Q&A series offers a closer look at their research and interests.
Name: Yong Jae Lee
Title: Associate Professor in Computer Sciences
Hometown: Seoul, Korea
Educational/professional background: B.S. UIUC; Ph.D. UT-Austin; Postdoc. CMU/UC Berkeley.
What is your field of research, and how did you get into it?
Computer vision. I took an image processing class during my junior year in college, and then worked with the professor on a research project on face detection. I became fascinated by this subfield of AI whose goal is to create intelligent systems that can understand the visual world as we humans do. So I decided to pursue this area for my graduate studies, and have been studying it ever since.
What attracted you to UW-Madison?
The world-class faculty and students, and amazing CS department.
What was your first visit to campus like?
It was towards the end of summer. The weather was perfect (sunny and cool), and campus was vibrant with lots of activity. I definitely felt a lot of positive energy.
Favorite place on campus?
I don’t have one yet as I’m still exploring, but it will likely be a location by the water where I can have stimulating research discussions with my students.
This is a unique point in time, as we’re returning after more than a year of pandemic. What do you most look forward to?
I look forward to interacting with real people and not just talking heads. Having said that, we’re still not out of the woods yet, so we should all do our parts to keep each other safe, but I am optimistic that we’ll be in a better situation soon.
Do you feel your work relates in any way to the Wisconsin Idea? If so, please describe how.
I want my research to advance science and humanity positively. One of the ways I try to do this is by publicly sharing the artifacts (e.g. code and data) from my lab’s research projects. I’ve seen our work being used by startups, tech enthusiasts – it’s very rewarding to know that what we created is being used by the general public, beyond the immediate academic community.
What’s something interesting about your area of expertise you can share that will make us sound smarter at parties, now that we can attend them again?
If you’ve ever taken a picture with a digital camera and seen it generate boxes around people’s faces, that was the result of computer vision.
Hobbies/other interests:
These days I spend almost all my free time with my kids (a one-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy). I particularly like building Legos with my son. I also enjoy playing sports (soccer and basketball are my favorites), although I have not had much time recently, I’d love to pick this up again.