Hyundai Motor Group has hired Park Min-woo, 48, a former head of autonomous driving software development at Nvidia, as president to succeed Song Chang-hyeon, the former Hyundai Motor Group Advanced Vehicle Platform (AVP) Deputy Minister and 42dot CEO, who resigned late last year. Hyundai Motor Group said it plans to strengthen collaboration with Nvidia and accelerate technology development and commercialization in areas such as software-defined vehicles (SDV) and Autonomous Driving by bringing Park on board.
Hyundai Motor Group said on the 13th that it has appointed Park Min-woo, Nvidia's head of Autonomous Driving software and research commercialization (executive vice president), as the new AVP Deputy Minister (president) and CEO of 42dot.
Born in 1977, Park graduated from Korea University with a degree in electrical, electronic and radio engineering, then earned a master's in electrical and electronic engineering and a doctorate in computer engineering from Pennsylvania State University in the United States. Park joined Tesla in 2015 and worked there for a little over two years, then from June 2017 to Jan. this year spent about 10 years at Nvidia leading research, development, mass production and commercialization of Computer Vision–based Autonomous Driving technologies.
Park joined Nvidia in the early days of Autonomous Driving technology development, established the overall development framework, and led mass production of Autonomous Driving software. Leading an organization dedicated to perception and sensor fusion technologies, Park is credited with successfully pushing the application of Nvidia's Autonomous Driving platform to vehicles through mass-production projects with global finished-vehicle corporations.
At Tesla, Park took part in the development of Autopilot. In the process, Park moved away from a structure reliant on existing external solutions to build an in-house, camera-centric Deep Learning system, playing a leading role in laying the groundwork for shifting Autonomous Driving technology from a hardware-centered to a software-centered architecture.
Park said, "Hyundai Motor Group is the corporations best positioned to make physical AI competitiveness a reality, going beyond SDV and Autonomous Driving," adding, "I will help Hyundai Motor Group lead the next generation of intelligent mobility and set the global standard for innovation."