Sebastian Seung

Hyunjune Sebastian Seung (English: /sung/ or [səŋ]; Korean: 승현준; Hanja: 承現峻) is President at Samsung Electronics & Head of Samsung Research and Anthony B. Evnin Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science. Seung has done influential research in both computer science and neuroscience. He has helped pioneer the new field of connectomics, "developing new computational technologies for mapping the connections between neurons," and has been described as the cartographer of the brain.

Since 2014, he has been a professor in computer science and neuroscience at Princeton University's Neuroscience Institute at the Jeff Bezos Center in Neural Dynamics, where he directs the Seung Labs. Before, he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a full professor in computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and as a professor in physics.

In the industry, he was a research scientist at the Bell Labs and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Since 2015, he has joined the board of advisors for Nara Logics, an MIT-based startup specializing in brain research and big data. Since 2018, he was hired as the Chief Research Scientist at Samsung.

He is most well known as a proponent of connectomics through his Ted talk "I am my Connectome" and his book Connectome which was named top 10 nonfiction books of the year 2012 by the Wall Street Journal and has been translated into dozens of languages.

He has also founded EyeWire, an online computer game that mobilizes social computing and machine learning on a mission to map the human brain. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of users from over a hundred countries, and it has recently partnered with KT Corporation to help spread the scientific mission and attract more players to the cause.

Seung is also known for his 1999 joint work on non-negative matrix factorization, an important algorithm used in AI and data science.