Seoul National University(SNU) has begun looking into allegations of plagiarism involving a thesis by an artificial intelligence(AI) research team led by Professor Yoon Sung-roh of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

In a statement issued on Monday, the prestigious school said its Committee on Research Integrity launched a probe into the allegations at the request of the school president.

Co-authors of the thesis in question who are associated with SNU will be subject to the investigation, including the son of science minister Lee Jong-ho.

The thesis by Yoon’s team was selected as an outstanding paper at the 2022 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition that ended in New Orleans last week.

The paper was released as an open access version and an oral presentation was given by the first author at the conference.

Plagiarism allegations surfaced when a YouTube video of the presentation uploaded last Friday drew posts claiming that the AI team’s thesis contained sentences copied from more than ten other papers.