cv
Updated July 23, 2026. Use the PDF icon to download the full CV.
General Information
| Full Name | Dong-Guw (David) Lee |
| donkeymouse@snu.ac.kr | |
| Location | Seoul, Republic of Korea |
| Website | donkeymouse.github.io |
| Google Scholar | Scholar profile |
Academic Interests
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Thermal Infrared Perception
- Radiometric representation learning
- Thermal object detection and segmentation
- Thermal image denoising and tone mapping
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Robotics and Computer Vision
- Robot perception for low-light and adverse environments
- Place recognition and SLAM-adjacent perception
- Underwater robotic monitoring and infrastructure inspection
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Generative and Vision-Language Models
- RGB-to-thermal image translation
- Controllable visual-language prompting
- Synthetic data generation for rare visual classes
Education
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Aug. 2026 Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering
Seoul National University, Republic of Korea - Dissertation: Data Scaling and Radiometric Representation Learning for Deep Thermal Perception
- Advised by Dr. Ayoung Kim
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Feb. 2022 M.S. in Robotics Program
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Republic of Korea - Dissertation: Thermal image-based Baby and Adult detection robust to residual thermal heat marks
- Advised by Dr. Dong-Soo Kwon
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Jun. 2019 BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Bristol, United Kingdom - Graduated with First Class Honours
- Dissertation: An alternative Contact Sensing methods for CNC machines
- Advised by Dr. John Haine
Positions
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Feb. 2022 - 2026 Graduate Student Research Assistant
Robust Perception and Mobile Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University -
Fall 2023 Head Graduate Student Teaching Assistant
Machine Learning for Mechanical Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University -
Feb. 2020 - Feb. 2022 Graduate Student Research Assistant
Telerobotics and Control Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KAIST
Research Experience
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2023 - Present Underwater Robotic Monitoring of Floating Infrastructure
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport - Project Lead, RPM Robotics Lab
- Led underwater perception modules for image dehazing, open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation, and vision-based image mosaicing.
- Conducted tank and at-sea trials with underwater robots in collaboration with POSTECH.
- Developing a training-free method for biofouling segmentation in underwater infrastructure imagery.
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2023 - Present Thermal Imaging for Smart Construction Environments
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport - Graduate Student Research Assistant, RPM Robotics Lab
- Developed a state-of-the-art thermal object detection system for construction-site monitoring.
- Developing a VLM-based segmentation module for building crack segmentation from thermal imagery.
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2025 Thermal Image-Based Navigation and Shipyard Monitoring
Samsung Heavy Industries - Project Lead, RPM Robotics Lab
- Led a synthetic data generation pipeline and real-time thermal object detector for rare shipyard object classes.
- Optimized detection of workers, transport vehicles, and unknown obstacles for day-and-night operation.
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2020 - 2021 AI-Based Safety Monitoring in Residential and Industrial Environments
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) - Graduate Student Research Assistant, KAIST TCL
- Collected and managed multimodal safety-monitoring datasets, including thermal infant burn-injury data and IMU safety-harness data.
- Obtained Institutional Review Board approval for both data-collection protocols.
- Developed thermal adult and infant detection algorithms and IMU-based safety-harness monitoring methods.
Invited Talks
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Sep. 2024 - Talk on Thermal Perception for Robot Autonomy, Samsung Heavy Industries Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea
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Jul. 2024 - Journal invitation talk on thermal image-based place recognition, International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots, New York, USA
Service
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Workshop and Tutorial Organization
- Workshop Lead for the Workshop on Thermal Infrared in Robotics, ICRA 2025
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Reviewer
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
- IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
- IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR)
- Nature Scientific Reports
Honors and Awards
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2019 - Wertheimer Prize, University of Bristol
- Bristol Plus Award
Languages and Skills
| Languages | Korean (native), English (native) |
| Programming | MATLAB, C/C++, Python |
| Frameworks | PyTorch, TensorFlow, ROS |