Steven Euijong Whang

Photo by Hector Garcia-Molina

Biography

Steven E. Whang is a Tenured Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at KAIST and jointly affiliated with the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI. His research interests include Responsible and Data-centric AI. Previously he was a Research Scientist at Google Research and co-developed the data infrastructure of the TensorFlow Extended (TFX) machine learning platform. Steven earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2012 from Stanford University. He was a Kwon Oh-Hyun Endowed Chair Professor (2020-2023) and received a Google AI Focused Research Award (2018, the first in Asia) and two Google Research Awards (2022 and 2023).

Curriculum Vitae (updated Apr. 2024)

Contact Information

Email: swhang {at} kaist {dot} ac {dot} kr
Phone: +82-42-350-7443
Office: N1-516
Lab: N1-519

Education

Postdoctoral Associate, Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford CA, July 2012-Dec. 2012
Ph.D., Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford CA, Sept. 2007-June 2012 (advisor: Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina)
M.S., Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford CA, Sept. 2005-June 2007 (advisor: Prof. Jennifer Widom)
B.S., Computer Science, KAIST, Mar. 1999-Feb. 2003

Experience

Tenured Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Mar. 2024-Present
Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Semiconductor System Engineering, KAIST, Mar. 2023-Present
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Sept. 2020-Feb. 2024
Kwon Oh-Hyun Endowed Chair Professor, KAIST, Mar. 2020-Feb. 2023
Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of AI, KAIST, Nov. 2019-Present
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Feb. 2018-Aug. 2020
Research Scientist, Google Research, Mountain View, CA, Dec. 2012-Jan. 2018
Research Intern, Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, CA, June 2008-Dec. 2008
Research Intern, HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, Summer 2007

Honors

Google Research Award, June 2022 & Oct. 2023
2023 Proposal: Fair Active Learning using Multi-armed Bandits
2022 Proposal: Fairness under Correlation Shifts
KAIST EE Best Teaching Award, Oct. 2022
EE477 Database and Big Data Systems, Spring 2022
Number of students: 64, course rating: 4.84/5 (highest among all EE undergrad courses)
Supported by a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Education Grant
Kwon Oh-Hyun Endowed Chair Professor, Mar. 2020-Feb. 2023
Among 4 in KAIST, 1 in KAIST EE
Google AI Focused Research Award, Oct. 2018-Sept. 2021
First in Asia
KAIST EE Best Paper Award, July 2019
Top-3 citations contributor to university ranking within KAIST EE
IEEE Senior Member, Apr. 2019
Best Paper Award, WebDB Workshop, May 2015
IBM PhD Fellowship, Mar. 2011-Feb. 2012
School of Engineering Fellowship, Stanford University, Sept. 2007-June 2008
Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS) Fellowship, Sept. 2005-June 2007
KAIST President's Prize for Academic Excellence at Commencement, Feb. 2003
Ranked 1st in Computer Science Department

Professional Service

Partnership/Center Chair Positions
- Chair: Inclusive AI Center, NYU-KAIST Partnership (2023)
- Chair: Google-KAIST Partnership (2019-2021)
Conference/Workshop Chair Positions
- General Chair: Workshop on Data Management for End-to-End Machine Learning (DEEM@ACM SIGMOD) (2021, 2020)
  Max. number of attendees in 2020: 123
- Workshop Chair: IEEE ICDE 2024 (Top-3 Database conference)
- Tutorial Chair: VLDB 2023 (Top Database conference)
- PC Chair: IEEE BigComp 2025
- PC Vice Chair: IEEE ICDE 2020 (Top-3 Database conference)
- Program Chair: Workshop on Data-centric AI (DCAI @ ICDM) 2023
- Volunteers Chair: ACM FAccT 2022
- Program Vice Chair: KCC 2020
- Panel Chair: IEEE BigComp (2020-2022)
- Demonstrations Chair: AIMLSystems 2021
- Publication Chair: DASFAA 2020
- Publicity Chair: PAKDD 2017
Associate Editor
- VLDB 2025 (PVLDB Volume 18; Top Database conference)
- IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) (2023-2025; Top Database journal)
- IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (2025, 2024)
- Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD) Journal (2020-2026)
Senior PC Member / Meta-Reviewer
- AAAI (2024, 2023) (Top AI conference)
- DASFAA 2024
- IEEE ICDE 2020 (Top-3 Database conference)
PC Member (Data Management):
- ACM SIGMOD (2022-2025, 2020, 2018, 2013-2015) (Top Database conference)
- VLDB (2021-2024, 2018, 2016, 2015) (Top Database conference)
  Distinguished Reviewer for VLDB 2023
- IEEE ICDE (2022, 2021, 2017, 2015, 2014) (Top-3 Database conference)
- TheWebConf (2019-2022) (Top Web conference)
- EDBT (2022, 2016)
PC Member / Reviewer (Machine Learning / AI)
- ICML (2024, 2022) (Top Machine Learning conference)
  Outstanding Reviewer for ICML 2022 (within top 10%)
- ICLR (2022-2024) (Top Machine Learning conference)
- NeurIPS (2021-2023) (Top Machine Learning conference)
- IJCAI (Program Committee Board 2022-2024, 2021) (Top AI conference)
- ACM FAccT 2024
Journal Reviewer: VLDB Journal, IEEE TKDE, ACM TODS, ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE TOIT, Science Advances, IEEE VIS

Google TFX TechTalk to US and Korea teams, Mar. 2023

Google-KAIST Partnership signing ceremony, July 2019

Fun Fact

I am an alum of KAIST swimming team KAORI

I did opening speeches (in Korean) for the 2018 and 2019 KAIST KAORI swimming competitions and also participated in the 2018 competition to win 3rd prize in the Freestyle relay with students.

KAORI congratulating me on tenure.