[3] He has helped pioneer the new field of connectomics, "developing new computational technologies for mapping the connections between neurons," and has been described as the cartographer of the brain.

[7] Since 2015, he has joined the board of advisors for Nara Logics, an MIT-based startup specializing in brain research and big data.

Seung is also known for his 1999 joint work on non-negative matrix factorization, an important algorithm used in AI and data science.

Swing was a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and Korean-American immigrant who escaped North Korea as a teenager.

It examines the statistical mechanics of vortex lines in high-temperature superconductors and uses tools such as the renormalization group perturbation theory.

In November, one of his former mentors David Tank from the Bell Labs suggested a new problem to Seung: how does the brain work?

He was invited to a neuroscience conference in Germany, and in January 2006 he brought two of his graduate students to learn about a new technology that imaged the brain in higher resolution built by Winfried Denk.

It was then that Seung worked day and night writing grant proposals to fund computational research in connectomics, which at the time was seen as a "highly speculative engineering project.

"[5] Since 2014, Seung joined the faculty at Princeton as a professor in neuroscience at the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics.

[4] KT Corporation, South Korea's largest telecom provider, recently partnered with EyeWire to advertise the game across the country and attract more players.

Essentially, in the game one has to identify and color connected components of neuron cells just from the 2d cross sections of brain tissue.

[19] Seung also helped set up experiments with Tank and Nobel Laureate Richard Axel to find memories in the connectome.

[5] His algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization have been widely applied to problems in visual learning, semantic analysis, spectroscopy, and bioinformatics.

He continues to study neural networks using mathematical models, computer algorithms, and circuits of biological neurons in vitro.

[4] "He is a popular teacher who traveled the world—Zurich; Seoul, South Korea; Palo Alto, California—delivering lectures on his mathematical theories of how neurons might be wired together to form the engines of thought.

"[5] In the past few years, he's been teaching Princeton's COS 485 Neural Networks, a course taken by both undergraduates and graduate students.

[5] He was known to be "so naturally exuberant that he was known for staging ad hoc dance performances with Harvard Square's street musicians."

As for sports, he continues to enjoy playing soccer in the fields of Princeton every Saturday, as well as with his oldest and middle daughters.