이 기사는 2021년 12월 14일 08시04분 thebell에 표출된 기사입니다

Samsung Electronics promoted young engineers and software developers who have expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), voice recognition and advanced chips to the company’s executive positions in its latest year-end executives reshuffle as it aims to strengthen its software competitiveness.

The Korean tech giant promoted Kim Chan-woo, head of the speech processing lab at Samsung Research, to its new executive vice president in its year-end executive reshuffle on Thursday, in recognition of his contribution to the voice recognition technology.

Kim, 45, was the youngest of the new executive vice presidents. After graduating from Seoul National University with a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, Kim received his Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute of School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University. He worked for EdumediaTek and SK Teletech as a R&D engineer.

Kim was a speech scientist at Microsoft from 2011 to 2013 and a senior software engineer at Google from 2013 to 2018. He worked for acoustic modeling for Google speech recognition systems including Google Home and enhancing noise robustness using deep learning techniques.

In early 2018, Kim joined Samsung Electronics’ Samsung Research. The company launched Samsung Research in December 2017 by reorganizing its Software R&D center and Digital Media & Communications (DMC) R&D center into a new entity. Samsung Research functions as an integrated R&D organization for Samsung’s consumer electronics, IT, and mobile businesses.

With the company merging its mobile and consumer electronics divisions, its software capability has become much more important. The company needs to develop software technology that connects IT devices such as smartphones and laptops with home appliances including TVs and refrigerators, and even robots. The Korean firm is making changes by cooperating with Google, building an integrated OS system and making Google's AI voice recognition service Google Assistant compatible with Galaxy.

The company’s other software engineers who were promoted to new executives include Head of Security 1Lab Shim Woo-cheol, Kim Yu-na, and Baik Aron. (Reporting by Hyun-ji Sohn)