A South Korean publication has been writing about Korean students finding meaningful employment in Silicon Valley. One of them landed a job with Apple and today they covered a brief interview with Jeong Min-woo.

When Jeong Min-woo began his master's program in natural language processing (NLP) at Pohang University of Science and Technology 15 year ago, he had no idea that artificial intelligence (AI) would become the next big thing.

Today, he works for Apple's Siri Advanced Development Group, a small elite team of experts that rapidly churns out ideas and prototypes for the tech giant's voice-activated assistant technology.

Not many details about the job could be discussed due to Apple's infamous policy of complete secrecy. But one recent work done by his team was to enable the activation of Siri simply by raising the user's wrist towards the mouth to speak, instead of speaking the words ''Hey Siri.''

''Whether the idea takes off or not, we're constantly thinking outside the box and coming up with new and compelling ones for a better human-computer interaction,'' said Jeong, who has close to a decade of experience in the industry.

Before joining Apple, Jeong was an applied scientist at Microsoft, where he worked on language and query understanding for Cortana, the company's own version of virtual assistant.

The opportunity that led him to land a job across the globe was a nine-month internship at Microsoft during his final year of his doctorate. Six months of the internship was done in China, while the remaining three were completed at the company's U.S. headquarters. While the internship did not immediately lead to a permanent position and Jeong, Microsoft did indeed offer him a fulltime job months later.

Jeong recalled, ''I grew up seeing Bill Gates as a legend so I was pretty psyched 'and just knowing that what I've been wrestling with for years could be utilized in so many innovative ways in a corporate environment was exciting.''

Jeong added that ''The words artificial intelligence have sort of a magical and mystical connotation thoug it has zero elements of either. It is strictly based on math, statistics and data analysis," he stressed.

''AI can make the daily lives of humans more convenient and comfortable, but it cannot take us over,'' said Jeong. ''These machines cannot think like humans. The only difference from the past and present is that they have become faster, better and more efficient, but again, it is strictly mechanical.''

Jeong says that Koreans aspiring to seek a similar career, Jeong should develop soft skills.''Candidates come with similar technical skills, so the difference is in their soft skills,'' he said. ''A good balance of confidence and humility will help you go far.''