Theta adds top-ranked Seoul National University as EdgeCloud AI Customer

We’re proud to announce Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea’s top national university, as the latest institution to join EdgeCloud as an AI customer. This partnership will provide SNU’s esteemed AIoT Lab, led by Associate Professor Hyung-Sin Kim, with access to Theta’s advanced EdgeCloud platform to accelerate groundbreaking research in Ambient AI, IoT, and AI-powered healthcare innovations.

Founded in 1946, Seoul National University (SNU) is one of the country’s most prestigious universities and globally renowned institutions for its excellence in research, education, and innovation. SNU leads in various academic disciplines, including engineering, natural sciences, and the arts, consistently ranking among the top universities in Asia. As a hub for cutting-edge research, SNU fosters groundbreaking advancements across diverse fields, making impactful contributions to global knowledge and technology.

Since launching EdgeCloud in June, Theta has gained significant traction in U.S. and Korean academia with institutions such as the University of Oregon, Korea University, Seoul Women’s University (SWU), KAIST, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), and Yonsei University utilizing Theta’s infrastructure to drive advancements across various cutting-edge fields.

AIoT Lab: Advancing AI and IoT Innovation

Under the leadership of Associate Professor Hyung-Sin Kim, the AIoT Lab at SNU’s Graduate School of Data Science has made notable contributions to the field, earning awards and securing high-impact research grants. Professor Kim, a distinguished expert in Ambient AI, machine learning, and IoT systems, holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University and brings extensive research experience from his postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley. His contributions have led to over 70 publications in leading conferences and journals, six U.S. patents, and numerous awards, including Google’s ExploreCSR and Model Optimization awards. His research addresses real-world applications of AI, particularly focusing on healthcare, federated learning, and resource-constrained devices, which enable privacy-preserving, real-time data processing.

Recent lab accomplishments include:

Awards and Recognition:

• Best Poster Award (Sleep AI) and People’s Choice Demo Award (Virtual Try-On) at ACM MobiSys 2024.
• Outstanding Paper Award at the Korea Data Science Conference (2023) and Best Paper Award from the Korea Sleep Medicine Conference (2022).
• 1st place in the 2023 Samsung AI Challenge (camera-invariant domain adaptation).
• 2nd place in the National AI Competition (2022) focused on semi-supervised image segmentation.

International Acclaim in Leading Conferences:

• Accepted papers at CVPR 2024, ICCV 2023 (Sleep AI and 3D Vision & Semi-supervised Learning), and IMWUT/UbiComp 2024 (Generative/Edge/Fashion AI)
• Research published at ECCV 2022 on meta-learning and model compression.

By utilizing Theta EdgeCloud’s powerful hybrid cloud GPUs, the AIoT lab will continue to advance healthcare AI by providing real-time health insights, such as on-device sleep monitoring. It will also enhance federated learning capabilities, enabling the lab to develop adaptive models that maintain data privacy using a distributed framework, and drive innovation in mixed reality and generative AI to develop complex on-device applications for immersive experiences.

“We are excited to utilize Theta Labs’ hybrid edge cloud GPU resources for our research. The EdgeCloud platform will allow us to push the boundaries of Ambient AI and IoT applications in areas such as healthcare and real-time data processing, and will provide the scalability and efficiency we need to develop a variety of solutions in our lab,” said Prof. Hyungshin Kim. “We think Theta’s blockchain powered decentralized AI infrastructure with over 30,000 global nodes will redefine today’s GPU landscape.”

This new partnership with Seoul National University, the top South Korean academic institution, underscores our commitment to supporting world-class AI research with EdgeCloud infrastructure. Together with Professor Hyungshin Kim and the AIoT Institute, we expect EdgeCloud to accelerate impactful research in a variety of AI and IoT areas, paving the way for innovative real-world applications. Theta now counts 4 of the top 5 Asian universities as customers, and we’re looking forward to bringing onboard the next 50 academic institutions in Asia and North America.