Experts in distributed computing, voice AI and VLA join the team
Angelo Corsaro, founder of Zenoh, named senior research fellow
Kim Jae-young from Google DeepMind, Chao Fang from Nvidia also on board
New hires to develop AI and autonomous driving technologies for real-world vehicle use
42dot, Hyundai Motor Group's global software center, has recruited three specialists from major IT companies including Google DeepMind and Nvidia, reinforcing its core technical talent across vehicle AI, autonomous driving and software-defined vehicles (SDV).
The company announced Friday that Angelo Corsaro has joined as senior research fellow, Kim Jae-young as Gleo AI model group lead, and Chao Fang as Silicon Valley VLA team lead.
Corsaro was the first to join, arriving at 42dot's Silicon Valley office in early September. He is an expert in distributed computing, real-time systems and robotics middleware.
He is best known as the creator of Zenoh, an open-source communication protocol. Zenoh enables data exchange across vastly different environments — from compact devices such as vehicles and robots to data centers and cloud infrastructure.
Corsaro led the Eclipse Zenoh project under the Eclipse Foundation and co-founded ZettaScale Technology, where he served as both CEO and CTO.
At 42dot, he will work on advancing the data connectivity architecture linking vehicles, the cloud and the company's intelligent mobility platform. His focus will be on building the foundational technology needed to ensure stable data transmission in SDV environments, where the volume of data generated by vehicles continues to grow.
Kim joined 42dot on Monday to lead vehicle voice AI development. He brings roughly 15 years of experience in conversational AI and signal processing from stints at Google DeepMind, Amazon, Samsung Electronics and Intel.
Kim holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Rather than following the conventional approach of converting speech to text before processing it, his research focuses on "audio-native AI" — systems in which AI directly understands and generates speech.
At 42dot, he will develop speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies capable of functioning even in noisy in-vehicle environments or when multiple people speak at once. He will also work on low-latency audio processing architectures to reduce the response time between a driver's voice command and the vehicle's reaction.
Chao Fang will head autonomous driving AI. Fang joined 42dot's Silicon Valley office last month after serving as a senior engineer in Nvidia's autonomous driving division.
At Nvidia, he contributed to the development of autonomous driving foundation models and to the mass production rollout of end-to-end perception technology — systems that handle everything from sensor input to driving decisions within a single AI model. Before that, he developed computer vision, vehicle motion prediction and path-planning technologies at Toyota Research Institute and Argo AI.
At 42dot, Fang will lead research into vision-language-action (VLA) models — an AI approach that takes in visual information from cameras and other sensors, interprets it in natural language, and translates that understanding into real driving actions. He will also work on bridging the gap between research-stage AI and autonomous driving technology deployable in actual vehicles.
Through these hires, 42dot plans to strengthen its development capabilities across distributed computing, vehicle software, voice AI and autonomous driving. The company also intends to accelerate work on integrating vehicles, the cloud and AI into a unified platform as Hyundai Motor Group pushes forward with its SDV transition.
"We are excited to welcome world-class experts whose technical innovation and mass production experience have been proven on the global stage," 42dot said. "By combining their expertise with 42dot's AI and software capabilities, we will lead global technology standards in SDV, autonomous driving and intelligent mobility."
kwater@heraldcorp.com
