Dong-Wan Choi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Inha University.

Prior to joining Inha University, he worked as a research associate with Dr. Thomas Heinis at Imperial College London from 2016-2017, and as a postdoc fellow with Dr. Jian Pei at Data Science Research Group of Simon Fraser University from 2015-2016. He also returned to Imperial College London as a visiting scholar in 2024. 

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from KAIST in 2014 under the supervision of Dr. Chin-Wan Chung. His Ph.D. dissertation  received the Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award from the KAIST CS department. He received his M.S. degree from KAIST in 2010 and his B.S. degree from Inha University in 2008. 

• (Mar. 2018–Present) Assistant -> Associate Professor, Department of Computer Engineering, Inha University, Korea

• (Jan. 2024–Dec. 2024) Visiting Scholar, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK

• (Sep. 2017– Feb. 2018) Assistant Professor, School of Software, Kookmin University, Korea

• (Nov. 2016– Aug. 2017) Research Associate, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK

• (Jan. 2015– Oct. 2016) Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada

• (Mar. 2014– Dec. 2014) Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Computer Science, KAIST, Korea

• (Feb. 2014) Ph.D., Department of Computer Science, KAIST, Korea

• (Feb. 2010) M.S., Department of Computer Science, KAIST, Korea

• (Feb. 2008) B.S., Department of Computer Engineering, Inha University, Korea

His research has been guided by a fundamental question:

"Where does knowledge reside, and how can it be organised to improve its accessibility and scalability?"

Although the objects and methodologies of his research have evolved, this underlying question has remained the same.

Knowledge in Big Data

His early research approached knowledge as something hidden within large-scale data. During his doctoral and postdoctoral work, he developed data management methods and scalable algorithms for discovering useful knowledge from spatial, spatio-textual, and trajectory data. This work addressed problems such as hot spot search, nearest-neighbor search, and movement pattern mining, resulting in five papers at VLDB and ICDE, leading venues in data management.

Knowledge in AI Models

Modern AI provides a new setting for the same fundamental question. Knowledge is not only hidden in raw data; through learning, it is transformed and accumulated within neural networks. A trained model can therefore be viewed as a vessel of implicit yet sophisticated knowledge. 

Based on this perspective, his research has expanded from managing large-scale data to understanding and managing learned knowledge in AI models. It investigates how learned knowledge can be accessed and reused, accumulated without destructive forgetting, reconstructed without the original training data, and efficiently used under limited computational resources.

Research Philosophy

While specific models and research topics will continue to evolve, the central goal remains to make knowledge more accessible, scalable, and reliable. His research combines machine learning with foundations in algorithms, data management, and data mining, with the aim of producing work that is theoretically rigorous as well as practically efficient. For the current research directions of Big Data Lab, please see Research Topics. 

• Best Paper Award in the field of Artificial Intelligence, KSC2024 (Dec. 2024)

• Best Paper Award  (Runner Up) in the field of Artificial Intelligence, KSC2023 (Dec. 2023)

• Best Paper Award  (Runner Up) in the field of Artificial Intelligence, KSC2022 (Dec. 2022)

• Principal Investigator, 사람 중심 인공지능 핵심원천기술 개발 사업, 혁신도약형, 정보통신기획평가원 (IITP) (Apr. 2022–Present)

• Principal Investigator, 기본연구, 한국연구재단 (NRF) (June 2021–2024)

• Best Paper Award in the field of Artificial Intelligence, KSC2020 (Dec. 2020)

• Best Paper Award  (Runner Up) in the field of Artificial Intelligence, KCC2020 (July 2020)

• Principal Investigator, 정보통신·방송 연구개발 사업, 혁신도약형, 정보통신기획평가원 (IITP) (Apr. 2019–2021)

• Principal Investigator, 이공학개인기초, 기본연구, 한국연구재단 (NRF) (June 2018–2021)

• Outstanding PhD Thesis Award in Computer Science, KAIST (Feb. 2014)

• Samsung Humantech Paper Award (bronze), Samsung Electronics (Feb. 2014)

• National Scholarship, KAIST (Feb. 2008–Feb. 2014)

• Academic Excellence Scholarship, Inha University (Spring and Fall, 2007)

• Boards

  • Member of the Board of Directors, KIISE Database Society of Korea (Oct. 2017-Present)

• Program Committee or Reviewer

  • AAAI: 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027

  • AISTATS: 2022

  • BMVC: 2025

  • CVPR: 2024

  • ECAI: 2025

  • EDBT: 2020

  • ICCV: 2025

  • ICLR: 2026

  • IJCAI: 2025

  • NeurIPS: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, 2026

  • PAKDD: 2020, 2021

  • SAC: 2026

  • SIGMOD: 2019

• Organization Committee

  • Korean DataBase Conference (KDBC) 2018

• Journal Reviewer

  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE): 2014, 2016, 2017

  • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS): 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025

  • The VLDB Journal: 2018

  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DAMI): 2017, 2018

  • Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS): 2017

  • Information Systems: 2019

  • Information Sciences: 2020, 2021

  • Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST): 2015

  • World Wide Web Journal (WWWJ): 2018

• Conference External Reviewer: ICWS 2014, PVLDB 2015, ICDE 2016, PVLDB 2016, ICDE 2019

• Invited Talk at Royal Holloway University of London, London, UK (Mar., 2024)

• Invited Talk at City University of London, London, UK (Feb., 2024)

• Seminar at AI Convergence Center of Inha University, Incheon, Korea (Oct. 27, 2020)

• Invited Talk at KETI, Seongnam, Korea (May 27, 2019)

• Presentation at VLDB Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Aug. 28 - Aug. 30, 2018)

• Invited Talk at GIST, Gwangju, Korea (July. 31, 2018)

• New faculty talk at KCC 2018, Seogwipo, Jeju, Korea (June 21, 2018)

• Invited Talk at Korea University, Seoul, Korea (June 5, 2018)

• New faculty talk at KIPS Spring 2018, Seoul, Korea (May 11, 2018)

• Invited Talk at the 57th NewDB workshop, Seoul, Korea (Mar. 17, 2018)

• Invited Talk at Inha University, Incheon, Korea (Jan. 10, 2018)

• Invited Talk at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea (Sep. 8, 2017)

• Research Seminar at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada (Aug. 22, 2016)

• Presentation at ICDE Conference, Helsinki, Finland (May. 16–May. 20, 2016)

• Presentation at ICDE Conference, Seoul, Korea (Apr. 13–Apr. 17, 2015)

• Visiting student of Prof. Yufei Tao at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Hong Kong (Feb. 2 - Feb. 17, 2013)

  • Funded by CUHK

• Presentation at VLDB Conference, Istanbul, Turkey (Aug. 27–Aug. 31, 2012)

• Presentation at DASFAA Conference, Hong Kong (Apr. 22–Apr. 25, 2011)