LG Group’s AI academy to foster young talent bears fruit

On April 6, at LG Inwhawon, called LG Academy in English, in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, 99 college students and twenty-somethings were wrestling with an assignment to develop artificial intelligence models that select customers with the highest likelihood of purchasing from an online distribution channel.

The participants rose above in the 30-to-one competition to advance to the two-day offline finals of the LG AI Hackathon hosted by LG Aimers, a regular training program designed to foster young AI talent from outside the South Korean group.

They achieved the highest scores among the 3,014 participants in one-month online preliminary rounds. Eight doctoral-level team leaders from LG AI Research Institute participated as mentors and guided their program development.

In 2022, LG launched LG Aimers to offer free practical AI courses to those between the ages of 19 and 29.

Over the past two years, about 10,000 young people have received AI training through LG Aimers. Among them, about 3,000 people completed the course and received certification as AI experts.

After taking its one-month intensive online course, the participants were able to build up their skills enough to develop an AI model.

The online course offered last month as the preliminary rounds of the LG AI Hackathon competition consisted of 33 lectures. Most courses were conducted at a master's university course level of difficulty.

What differentiates LG Aimers from other AI classes is that their programs are based on actual industrial data from LG Group companies. For example, its participants were given the task of predicting sales volume by online distribution channel during the program offered in the second half of last year.

Kang Jin-mo, who joined LG Uplus Corp. in the second half of last year after completing the LG Aimers course, is developing an AI and machine learning-based recommendation engine at the broadband service provider.

The training courses' themes change for each semester to reflect the latest AI trends and changes in the industrial field.

For the LG AI Hackathon finalists, seven LG Group companies are hosting a joint recruitment fair. Those companies include LG AI Research Institute, LG Electronics Inc. and LG Energy Solution Ltd.

Recruitment consultants from the LG Group units provide one-on-one customized counseling. The top finalists will receive benefits such as an exemption from document screening when applying for employment with LG Companies.  

LG plans to grow LG Aimers into a nationwide talent development program.

Write to Eui-Myung Park at uimyung@hankyung.com

Yeonhee Kim edited this article.