Keunwoo Choi

PhD ยท AI Research and Engineering ยท Founder ยท New York City ยท

I'm a Co-founder and Chief AI Officer at Ortet.

I'm also an adjunct professor at KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea. I collaborate with professors and students at Culture Technology department. Previously, I taught at NYU as an adjunct professor.

Before Ortet, I worked on multimodal LLMs at Upstage. Before that, I led a team of MLEs to train internal large language models (LLMs) for therapeutic and scientific applications at Roche / Genentech.

Previously, I applied machine learning and deep learning techniques to solve music and audio AI -- problems such as music tagging, source separation, transcription as well as audio understanding and synthesis.


Experience

Co-founder & Chief AI Officer

Ortet, New York, USA

Ortet is a frontier AI lab for health, envisioning predictably better care for everyone.
Leading the AI research and building everything together, from day 0.

2026 - Present

AI Engineer

Multimodal LLMs.

2025 - 2026

Adjunct Professor

Providing mentorship, research collaboration, and consulting.

2025 - Present

Senior Principal ML Scientist

Leading development of large Language Models.

2023 - 2025

Adjunct Professor

DM-GY 9103/Q Deep Learning for Media

2024

AI Scientist / Director

Gaudio Lab, Seoul, Korea

Leading an AI music/audio team covering music source separation, audio generation, and 3D audio.

2022 - 2023

Senior Research Scientist

ByteDance AI Lab, Mountain View, USA

Large-scale deep learning systems for music and video content creation, social media, and music streaming service. Music research roadmapping for scalable and sustainable growth.

2020 - 2022

Research Scientist

Spotify, New York, USA

Music content understanding and discovery for 300M+ users of the global leader in music industry

2018 - 2020

Researcher

ETRI, Daejeon, South Korea

3D audio reproduction systems for immersive acoustic experience

2010 - 2014

Education

Queen Mary University of London

PhD in Computer Science, Centre for Digital Music, London, UK
Supervisor: Mark Sandler and George Fazekas
Thesis title: Deep Neural Networks for Music Tagging
2014 - 2018

New York University

Visiting Scholar, Center for Data Science, New York, USA
Supervisor: Kyunghyun Cho
2016 - 2017

Seoul National University

Master in Electric Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul, South Korea
Supervisor: Koeng-Mo Sung
Thesis title: A NMF-Based Mono-To-Stereo Blind Upmix
2009 - 2011

Seoul National University

Bachelor in Electric Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul, South Korea
Full tuition fee waiver scholarship (2005 - 2009)
2005 - 2009

Activities

๐Ÿ† I received Best Paper Award at ISMIR 2017, the most prestigous music information retrieval research conference.
๐ŸŽ–๏ธ I was also nominated for Best Paper Award at ISMIR 2023.

โŒจ๏ธ I am a contributor of librosa, Keras, torchdata, and torchaudio.

๐Ÿ“„ I first-authored 10+ peer-reviewed papers at venues including ISMIR, ICASSP, EUSIPCO, ICML Workshop, etc.
๐Ÿ“– I review papers at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ISMIR, ICASSP, AAAI, etc.
๐Ÿ’ก I created and have co-organized an AI challenge for sound synthesis in 2023 and 2024.
๐Ÿ’ก I am one of the general chairs of ISMIR 2025, with Prof. Juhan Nam and Prof. Dasaem Jeong.

๐ŸŽผ I make music as keunwoo.OOO, as a composer, lyricist, singer, and producer.
๐Ÿ“น I record and edit audio and videos for Hayoung Lyou, my wife and an amazing jazz composer / pianist.