Youngwoo Yoon

I'm a Principal Researcher in the HRI Research Lab at ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), South Korea. I am interested in problems at the intersection of HCI, robotics, and machine learning. In particular during my PhD, I have studied speech gesture synthesis for embodied conversational agents like virtual characters and humanoid robots using deep generative models.

[Open Positions]
포닥, 석/박사 학생 (ETRI-UST 캠퍼스), 학부생 인턴 모집합니다. Motion AI, HRI 분야에 관심있으신 분들께서는 연락 바랍니다.
We are recruiting postdocs, graduate students (for the ETRI-UST campus), and undergraduate interns. Those interested in the field of motion AI or HRI are encouraged to contact me.

contact: youngwoo .AT. etri.re.kr

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS (Google scholar, Full list)

Evaluating Human-Care Robot Services for the Elderly: An Experimental Study
Miyoung Cho*, Dohyung Kim*, Minsu Jang*, Jaeyeon Lee*, Jaehong Kim*, Woo-han Yun, Youngwoo Yoon, Jinhyeok Jang, Chankyu Park, Woo-Ri Ko, Jaeyoon Jang, Ho-Sub Yoon, Daeha Lee, Choulsoo Jang
International Journal of Social Robotics [Springer]

Evaluating gesture-generation in a large-scale open challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022
Taras Kucherenko*, Pieter Wolfert*, Youngwoo Yoon*, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, Gustav Eje Henter (* equal contribution)
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) [ACM DL], [Project page]

LoTa-Bench: Benchmarking Language-oriented Task Planners for Embodied Agents
Jae-Woo Choi*, Youngwoo Yoon*, Hyobin Ong, Jaehong Kim, Minsu Jang (* equal contribution)
ICLR 2024 [arXiv], [GitHub]

Objective Evaluation Metric for Motion Generative Models: Validating Fréchet Motion Distance on Foot Skating and Over-smoothing Artifacts
Antoine Maiorca, Hugo Bohy, Youngwoo Yoon, and Thierry Dutoit
ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG) 2023 [ACM DL]

The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large-scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settings
Taras Kucherenko*, Rajmund Nagy,* Youngwoo Yoon*, Jieyeon Woo, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter (* equal contribution)
ICMI 2023 [ACM DL], [Project page]

Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis using Discrete Gesture Token Learning
Shuhong Lu, Youngwoo Yoon, and Andrew Feng
IROS 2023 [arXiv]

Learning to Boost Training by Periodic Nowcasting Near Future Weights
Jinhyeok Jang, Woo-han Yun, Won Hwa Kim, Youngwoo Yoon, Jaehong Kim, Jaeyeon Lee, ByungOk Han
ICML 2023 [Paper], [GitHub]

A Tool for Extracting 3D Avatar-Ready Gesture Animations from Monocular Videos
Andrew Feng, Samuel Shin, and Youngwoo Yoon
ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG) 2022 [ACM DL], [Project page]

The GENEA Challenge 2022: A large evaluation of data-driven co-speech gesture generation
Youngwoo Yoon*, Pieter Wolfert*, Taras Kucherenko*, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, and Gustav Eje Henter (* equal contribution)
ICMI 2022 [arXiv], [ACM DL], [Project page]

SGToolkit: An Interactive Gesture Authoring Toolkit for Embodied Conversational Agents
Youngwoo Yoon*, Keunwoo Park*, Minsu Jang, Jaehong Kim, and Geehyuk Lee (* equal contribution)
UIST 2021 (Acceptance rate: 25.9%) [arXiv], [ACM DL (incl. videos)], [Code]

A Large, Crowdsourced Evaluation of Gesture Generation Systems on Common Data: The GENEA Challenge 2020
Taras Kucherenko*, Patrik Jonell*, Youngwoo Yoon*, Pieter Wolfert, and Gustav Eje Henter (* equal contribution)
IUI 2021 (Acceptance rate: 27%) [arXiv], [ACM DL], [Project page]

Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, and Speaker Identity
Youngwoo Yoon, Bok Cha, Joo-Haeng Lee, Minsu Jang, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, and Geehyuk Lee
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2020) (Impact factor 6.495, Q1) [arXiv], [ACM DL], [Video], [Code]

DeepFisheye: Near-Surface Multi-Finger Tracking Technology Using Fisheye Camera
Keunwoo Park, Sunbum Kim, Youngwoo Yoon, Tae-Kyun Kim, and Geehyuk Lee
UIST 2020 (Acceptance rate: 22%) [PDF], [ACM DL], [Project page]

Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots
Youngwoo Yoon, Woo-Ri Ko, Minsu Jang, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, and Geehyuk Lee
ICRA 2019 [arXiv], [IEEE], [Video], [Data and Code]

EMPLOYMENT

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)

2022-Present Principal Researcher, Intelligent Robotics Research Division
2014-2022 Senior Researcher, Intelligent Robotics Research Division
2008-2014 Researcher, Intelligent Robotics Research Division

EDUCATION

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Ph.D. 2017-2022 in Computer Science
- Thesis: Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Embodied Conversational Agents (🏆 Outstanding Thesis Award)
- Advisor: Geehyuk Lee
M.S. 2006-2008 in Computer Science
- Thesis: Context-Aware Photo Selection for Promoting Photo Consumption on a Mobile Phone
- Advisor: Geehyuk Lee
- Graduation with Honors
B.S. 2003-2006 in Computer Science

AWARDS

Research Paper Award, ETRI, 2023
Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award, KAIST School of Computing, 2022
Distinguished Graduate Award, KAIST (ICU), 2008
Science and Engineering Research Scholarships, Korea Science and Engineering Foundation, 2006-2007
ACM/International Collegiate Programming Contest Asia Regional - Seoul, 6th Place, ACM, 2005
Korean Presidential Science Scholarships, Korea Science and Engineering Foundation, 2003-2006
Information and Communication Minister’s Award, 2002 (i-clean public contest)

SERVICE

Workshop/Challenge Organizing
Associate Editor of RO-MAN 2024
Reviewer
- RA-L (2019-), IJSR (2021-), TVCG (2020-), CGF (2022), ETRI Journal (2017-2019), IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (2017), IET Intelligent Transport Systems (2016)
- SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia (2022-), RO-MAN (2013-), ICRA (2018-), HRI (2023), Eurographics (2020), VR (2020), UR (2020), IROS (2017-2018), MobileHCI (2008-2009)

TEACHING

Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning, KAIST(ICU), Fall 2007
Teaching Assistant, Human-Computer Interaction, KAIST(ICU), Summer 2006