Sung, co-founder and CEO of Upstage, began his journey by developing the Korean search engine Kacchine in 1995 and subsequently spearheading the creation of KebiMail. He later received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz, where he delved into the research of Mining Software Repositories at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
His illustrious career includes the achievement of four SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards and the honor of the most influential paper over the past decade in ICME for his work in bug prediction. His distinguished contributions have also been recognized by industry giants such as Google and Microsoft through Faculty Awards, and he was granted the Best Lecturer Award for his outstanding teaching.
Post academia, Sung led as the Founding Head of Naver Clova AI, where he recruited over 120 personnel, successfully establishing one of the best AI teams in South Korea. He then founded Upstage, where he has continued to "Make AI Beneficial." His accomplishments include developing the leading AI OCR engine, creating a recommendation engine, and launching AskUp, the largest GPT-based ChatAI service in Korea with over 1.1 million users.
