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NCsoft AI Media Talk

  • Saturday, December 29, 2018, 10:33 pm
  • ACROFAN=Hyung-Keun Kim
  • hyungkeun.kim@acrofan.com
NCsoft held an AI media talk event at its R&D center in Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do on March 15th, 2018. The event was organized to introduce NCsoft's current status and vision of AI research and development. The officials including Un-hee Han, Chief of Media Intelligence TF, Jae-jun Lee, Director of AI Center, and Jung-seon Jang, Chief of NLP Center, from NCsoft attended the event.

“NCsoft has started AI research in 2011 and organized an event today to introduce what it has done so far. I would like to inform of the researches on AI that NCsoft has been preparing for a long time.” – said Un-hee Han, Chief of NCsoft’s Media Intelligence TF

▲ AI media talk of NCsoft was held.

According to the presentation, NCsoft is currently researching AI with the main focuses on AI Center (Artificial Intelligence Center) and NLP Center (Natural Language Processing Center). The AI Center and NLP Center, which have a total of more than 100 researchers, are operating five organizations under the direct control of CEO Taek-jin Kim. The AI Center is composed of Game AI Lab, Speech Lab, and Vision TF, and the NLP Center is studying technology areas through Language AI Lab and Knowledge AI Lab.

In the Game AI Lab, the researches on AI technologies for game development and services such as game playing AI, AI for game planning, AI for game art development, based on reinforcement learning, deep learning and simulation technology, are being conducted. By applying AI to ‘Infinite Tower’ content of ‘Blade & Soul’, the environment where users can duel with AI was created. Recently, through deep reinforcement learning technology, which is the combination of the existing reinforcement technology and deep learning, the performance of AI is improved and a combat AI that gives a similar feeling to people by using combat logs of users are being developed.

In the Speech Lab, the researches on voice, speaker, and emotion recognition technology that recognizes the language, speaker, and emotion information contained in the voice signal, and voice synthesis technology that converts a text into human voice such as natural dialogue and emotional voice are being conducted. The lad is also studying how to use this technology in the process of game development and play.

In the Vision TF, the researches on images and video, such as AI recognizing images or video, or creating images using generative adversarial network (GAN) technology, are being conducted. This is the case that an AI automatically assigns tag information to graphic resources, performs coloring (sketch auto-coloring), and automatically generates the necessary images.

▲ Game AI Lab applied AI to ‘Infinite Tower’ content of 'Blade & Soul'.

In the Language AI Lab, the researches on various application technologies to exchange information in human languages, such as Q&A, dialogue, document summary, and story creating technology as well as natural language processing technology, are being conducted. Beyond simply asking questions and letting AI answer, this lab tries to make AI grasp the significant parts of the text and summarize it.

In the Knowledge AI Lab, the researches on the technologies that guesses, generates and delivers new knowledge from meaningful knowledge, which is extracted and saved from various data such as text, are being conducted.

Meanwhile, NCsoft plans to expand and strengthen its investments in the fostering and R&D of AI researchers. To this end, NCsoft is actively recruiting talented individuals. The AI Center and the NLP Center are working closely with 12 research laboratories in the domestic AI field such as Seoul National University and KAIST. In recent years, Hae-chang Lim, the former professor of Korea University Department of Computer, who is Korea's top authority in the field of natural language processing, has joined NLP center as an advisory professor.

At the same time, the firm will continue to share the status of such researches not only within the firm but also outside including the academic community. Actually, it had held ‘NCSOFT AI DAY 2018’ on February 22nd and 23rd and shared the current status of the research development with about 200 employees of NCsoft and 100 people including domestic graduate school professors in industrial cooperation and master and doctoral students.