Bio

Hanseok Ko, Professor and Newton-Bennett Endowed Chair of Engineering, is a faculty member at the School of Engineering at The Catholic University of America. He joined the faculty following more than two decades as a senior faculty member at Korea University and twelve years as a senior/principal engineer with the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Dr. Ko has held visiting appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (2001) and at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), Department of Computer Science (2009).

Internationally recognized for his contributions to signal processing and intelligent systems, Dr. Ko led the development of core acoustic and speech interface technologies for Hyundai/Kia Motors, as well as image processing and computer vision systems for Samsung.

He currently directs the Multimodal AI Laboratory, where he oversees research sponsored by national funding agencies and industry partners. The lab focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, multimodal signal processing (including acoustics, speech, and image processing), and human-machine interaction for robotics and healthcare applications.

Dr. Ko has authored over 700 scholarly publications and holds 83 U.S. and Korean patents, either granted or pending. As of August 2024, he has supervised 43 Ph.D. and 110 M.S. graduates.

He served as General Chair of both IEEE ICASSP 2024 and INTERSPEECH 2022, and is a former President of the Acoustical Society of Korea. His professional recognitions include election as a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA, 2023) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, 2014). He is currently serving as a Distinguished Lecturer (2025–2026) for the IEEE Signal Processing Society.