Intel
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Dr. Demis Hassabis, the Developer of AlphaGo, Lectures at KAIST
AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind in London to play the traditional Chinese board game Go, had five matches against Se-Dol Lee, a professional Go player in Korea from March 8-15, 2016. AlphaGo won four out of the five games, a significant test result showcasing the advancement achieved in the field of general-purpose artificial intelligence (GAI), according to the company.
Dr. Demis Hassabis, the Chief Executive Officer of Google DeepMind, visited KAIST on March 11, 2016 and gave an hour-long talk to students and faculty. In the lecture, which was entitled “Artificial Intelligence and the Future,” he introduced an overview of GAI and some of its applications in Atari video games and Go.
He said that the ultimate goal of GAI was to become a useful tool to help society solve some of the biggest and most pressing problems facing humanity, from climate change to disease diagnosis.
2016.03.11 View 4835 -
The 2015 Intelligent SoC Robot War Finals
The final round of the 2015 Intelligent SoC (System on Chip) Robot War took place from October 29, 2015 to November 1, 2015 at Kintex in Ilsan, Korea.
A “SoC robot” refers to an intelligent robot capable of autonomous object recognition and decision making by employing advanced semiconductor and information technology.
First hosted in 2002, the Intelligent SoC Robot War cultivates top talents in the field of semiconductors and seeks to revitalize Korea’s information technology (IT) and semiconductor industries.
The event consists of two competitions: HURO and the Tae Kwon Do Robot.
In the HURO competition, participating robots sequentially complete eight assignments without outside controls. Whichever robot finishes the highest number of tasks and spends the shortest amount of time for the completion of assignments wins the competition.
At the HURO competition, a SoC robot overcomes obstacles.
The Tae Kwon Do Robot competition includes Korea’s traditional martial arts into robotics. Here, the winner is selected by sparring between a pair of competitors. The camera attached to the robot’s head recognizes the position of the opponent and the distance between them. From that, the robot takes actions such as punching or kicking.
Two robots are vying for the title of the Tae Kwon Do Robot.
This year, 570 people from 104 teams from all over the nation applied, and after preliminaries, 26 teams entered the finals.
The winners of the HURO and Tae Kwon Do Robot competitions receive awards from the president and prime minister of Korea, respectively.
The Chairman of the Intelligent SoC Robot War, Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo of Electrical Engineering Department at KAIST, said,
“Korea’s strength in semiconductors and information technology can serve as a great potential to advance the development of intelligent robots. We hope that our experiences in this competition will allow Korea to excel in this field.”
2015.11.01 View 9637 -
Establishment of System Metabolic Engineering Strategies
Although conventional petrochemical processes have generated chemicals and materials which have been useful to mankind, they have also triggered a variety of environmental problems including climate change and relied too much on nonrenewable natural resources. To ameliorate this, researchers have actively pursued the development of industrial microbial strains around the globe in order to overproduce industrially useful chemicals and materials from microbes using renewable biomass. This discipline is called metabolic engineering.
Thanks to advances in genetic engineering and our knowledge of cellular metabolism, conventional metabolic engineering efforts have succeeded to a certain extent in developing microbial strains that overproduce bioproducts at an industrial level. However, many metabolic engineering projects launched in academic labs do not reach commercial markets due to a failure to fully integrate industrial bioprocesses.
In response to this, Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee and Dr. Hyun Uk Kim, both from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST, have recently suggested ten general strategies of systems metabolic engineering to successfully develop industrial microbial strains. Systems metabolic engineering differs from conventional metabolic engineering by incorporating traditional metabolic engineering approaches along with tools of other fields, such as systems biology, synthetic biology, and molecular evolution.
The ten strategies of systems metabolic engineering have been featured in Nature Biotechnology released online in October 2015, which is entitled "Systems strategies for developing industrial microbial strains."
The strategies cover economic, state-of-the-art biological techniques and traditional bioprocess aspects. Specifically, they consist of: 1) project design including economic evaluation of a target bioproduct; 2) selection of host strains to be used for overproduction of a bioproduct; 3) metabolic pathway reconstruction for bioproducts that are not naturally produced in the selected host strains; 4) increasing tolerance of a host strain against the bioproduct; 5) removing negative regulatory circuits in the microbial host limiting overproduction of a bioproduct; 6) rerouting intracellular fluxes to optimize cofactor and precursor availability necessary for the bioproduct formation; 7) diagnosing and optimizing metabolic fluxes towards product formation; 8) diagnosis and optimization of microbial culture conditions including carbon sources; 9) system-wide gene manipulation to further increase the host strain's production performance using high-throughput genome-scale engineering and computational tools; and 10) scale-up fermentation of the developed strain and diagnosis for the reproducibility of the strain's production performance.
These ten strategies were articulated with successful examples of the production of L-arginine using Corynebacterium glutamicum, 1,4-butanediol using Escherichia coli, and L-lysine and bio-nylon using C. glutamicum.
Professor Sang Yup Lee said, "At the moment, the chance of commercializing microbial strains developed in academic labs is very low. The strategies of systems metabolic engineering outlined in this analysis can serve as guidelines when developing industrial microbial strains. We hope that these strategies contribute to improving opportunities to commercialize microbial strains developed in academic labs with drastically reduced costs and efforts, and that a large fraction of petroleum-based processes will be replaced with sustainable bioprocesses."
Lee S. Y. & Kim, H. U. Systems Strategies for Developing Industrial Microbial Strains. Nature Biotechnology (2015).
This work was supported by the Technology Development Program to Solve Climate Change on Systems Metabolic Engineering for Biorefineries (NRF-2012M1A2A2026556) and by the Intelligent Synthetic Biology Center through the Global Frontier Project (2011-0031963) from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP), Korea, and through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea. This work was also supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Picture: Concept of the Systems Metabolic Engineering Framework
(a) Three major bioprocess stages (b) Considerations in systems metabolic engineering to optimize the whole bioprocess. List of considerations for the strain development and fermentation contribute to improving microbial strain's production performance (red), whereas those for the separation and purification help in reducing overall operation costs by facilitating the downstream process (blue). Some of the considerations can be repeated in the course of systems metabolic engineering.
2015.10.19 View 11061 -
POSTECH-KAIST Science War
The 14th POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) and KAIST Science War took place at the KAIST campus in Daejeon on September 18-19, 2015.
Students from both universities participated in the two-day sports and science event.
The Science War has been held every September since 2002 to encourage interaction among students of the two schools. Following the rule that puts the hosting school second in the title, this year it is called the “POSTECH-KAIST War.”
The competition consists of seven events: hacking, a science quiz bowl and AI (artificial intelligence) for the science section, LOL (League of Legends) for the e-Sports section, and lastly, baseball, basketball and football for the sports section.
Of the seven events, the school that wins four or more events is declared the winner. Thus far, KAIST has had seven wins and five losses.
In addition, the cheering squads and clubs of both schools participated. They were KAIST’s ELKA, Twilight, Infinite, and MindFreak, as well as POSTECH’s Cheero, Bremen, Stiller, and P-Funk perform.
2015.09.30 View 5170 -
Professor Woontack Woo Demonstrates an Optical Platform Technology for Augmented Reality at Smart Cloud Show
Professor Woontack Woo of the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST participated in the Smart Cloud Show, a technology exhibition, hosted by the university’s Augmented Human Research Center and presented the latest development of his research, an optical platform system for augmented reality.
This event took place on September 16-17, 2015 at Grand Seoul Nine Tree Convention Center in Seoul.
At the event, Professor Woo introduced a smart glass with an embedded augmented reality system, which permits remote collaboration between an avatar and the user’s hand.
The previous remote collaboration was difficult for ordinary users to employ because of its two-dimensional screen and complicated virtual reality system.
However, with the new technology, the camera attached to artificial reality (AR) glasses recognizes the user’s hand and tracks it down to collaborate. The avatar in the virtual space and the user’s hand interact in real space and time.
The key to this technology is the stable, real-time hand-tracking technique that allows the detection of the hand’s locations and the recognition of finger movements even in situations of self-occlusion.
Through this method, a user can touch and manipulate augmented contents as if they were real-life objects, thereby collaborating remotely with another user who is physically distant by linking his or her movements with an avatar.
If this technology is adopted widely, it may bring some economic benefits such as increased productivity due to lower costs for mobility and reduction in social overhead costs from the decrease in the need of traveling long distance.
Professor Woo said, “This technology will provide us with a greater opportunity for collaboration, not necessarily restricted to physical travelling, which can be widely used in the fields of medicine, education, entertainment, and tourism.”
Professor Woo plans to present his research results on hand-movement tracking and detection at the 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence (URAI 2015), to be held on October 28-30, 2015, at Kintex in Goyang, Korea.
He will also present a research paper on remote collaboration at the ICAT-EGVE 2015 conference, the merger of the 25th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT 2015) and the 20th Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments (EGVE 2015), which will take place on October 28-30, 2015 at the Kyoto International Community House, Kyoto, Japan.
2015.09.16 View 9251 -
KAIST to Hold a Colloquium on the Internet of Things and Open Stack
With the support of the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning of Korea, KAIST hosted a colloquium on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Open Stack at the KAIST Research Center for Global Cooperation located in Pangyo. The upcoming event was organized to provide an overview of the technological trends to IT companies and foster their success in the global market.
The colloquium invited numerous field-experts as speakers and discussed the influence of IoT and OpenStack on the small- and medium-sized companies in Korea.
Professor Gwan-Hoo Lee from the American University joined as a speaker and shared his insights of how IoT would change the global business environment. He introduced various business models developed by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, and Cisco and discussed how Korean companies could utilize the existing tools and strategy to succeed in the global market. His talk focused specifically on the importance of overseas partnerships and technology stack analysis.
President Hyun-Jung Jang from the Korean OpenStack Community also gave a speech on global partnership through OpenStack. He discussed the future trends of OpenStack and why companies should invest in the field.
KAIST used the event as an opportunity to provide information to domestic companies that are interested in building partnerships with overseas companies and in developing new IoT and OpenStack technology.
More information about the event can be provided online at www.ictc.or.kr.
2015.09.11 View 5501 -
Experts Gather to Develop a Korean Supercomputer on KAIST Campus
KAIST hosted an inauguration ceremony for the Super-Capacity Computing Advancement Forum on July 2, 2015, to increase Korea's national computing capacity. It represents a gathering consisting of experts drawn across industry, university, and institutes in super-capacity computing.
More than ten experts from the university, including President Steve Kang and Professor Oh-Joon Kwon of the Department of Aerospace Engineering, attended the ceremony. This forum was created to secure a competitive edge in the global market by establishing a long-term strategy for the development of super computers.
The recent rise of new service industries, such as voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, has increased the need for super-capacity computing to deal more rapidly with big data. The need is made more urgent by increased investment by leading countries in this field.
The forum will organize and operate working-level subcommittees to promote in-depth discussions on issues related to super-capacity computing systems. Open forums and public hearings will be held until October, to gather information and insights needed to advance the field.
President Steve Kang, the Chairman of the Forum, said, “The forum will have a great impact on Korea’s effort to become a world leader in super-capacity computing. We plan to debate the pros and cons of potential solutions to the Korean government, to assist them in building the nation’s competitiveness in super-capacity computing capability.”
2015.07.07 View 6702 -
KAIST Ranks 39th Among Top 50 Patent Filers in the US
The US National Academy of Inventors and Intellectual Property Owners Association have just released a list of top universities worldwide, which filed the highest number of patents in the US last year. KAIST has ranked 39th with 59 patents. A total of three institutions from Korea made the list, including KAIST (114 patents) and Seoul National University’s R&DB Foundation (57 patents). For details, see the article below:
ChicagoInno, June 22, 2015
“Three Illinois Universities Are Among the Top 50 Universities Granted YS Utility Patents”
http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2015/06/22/patent-filings-northwestern-illinois-uchicago-among-top-patent-filers-worldwide/
2015.06.23 View 7429 -
Professor Jinwoo Shin of the Electrical Engineering Department Receives the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Research Award
Professor Jinwoo Shin of the Electrical Engineering Department at KAIST was selected as the recipient of the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Research Award.
As a computer systems performance evaluation community, SIGMETRICS annually awards a junior researcher. He was selected as the 8th annual recipient, being the first from an Asian university.
Professor Shin was recognized for his work in theoretical analysis of stochastic queueing networks and machine learning. He said, “I would like to contribute to the expansion of computing and network theory in Korea wherein those fields are unrecognized.”
He has received numerous awards including Kennneth C. Sevcik (Best Student Paper) Award at SIGMETRICS 2009, George M. Sprowls (Best MIT CS PhD Thesis) Award 2010, Best Paper Award at MOBIHOC 2013, Best Publication Award from INFORMS Applied Probability Society 2013, and Bloomberg Scientific Research Award 2015.
2015.06.21 View 9743 -
Professor Jinwoo Shin Receives the Bloomberg Scientific Research Award
Professor Jinwoo Shin (https://sites.google.com/site/mijirim/) of the Electrical Engineering Department at KAIST has been selected as one of the three winners to receive the first Bloomberg Scientific Research Award this month. The newly created award is presented to researchers in computer science who conduct high-quality research in such areas as machine learning, natural language processing, machine translation, statistics, and theory.
Professor Shin submitted his research proposal entitled “Scalable Probabilistic Deep Leaning,” and the award will support funding his research for one year. For details, please click on the link below for an article released by Bloomberg News, announcing the winners of the award:
Bloomberg News, April 28, 2015
“Announcing the Winners of the Bloomberg’s First Scientific Research Program”
https://3blmedia.com/News/Announcing-Winners-Bloombergs-First-Scientific-Research-Program
2015.04.30 View 8397 -
KAIST Hosts a Symposium on IPR
KAIST’s Graduate School of Future Strategy (http://futures.kaist.ac.kr) hosted a symposium entitled “Future Strategies to Grow Korea as the Hub for the World’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)” under the theme of “Patent Laws and a Revised Bill for the Code of Civil Procedures” in the National Assembly’s Memorial Hall on April 9, 2015.
Experts who attended the symposium included Professor James Dator, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Sang-Wook Han, a lawyer and Vice President of Korea Intellectual Property Protection Association (KIPRA), and Min Seo, a former Chairman of Civil Law Revision Commission of the Ministry of Justice, Korea.
The event consisted of special lectures, patent law presentations, a revised bill for the code of civil procedures in patent law, and a general discussion forum. Professor Dator, the keynote speaker, addressed the future of intellectual property. San-Wook Han (KIPRA) talked about new and effective changes in Korean patent law such as the compensation against IPR violations and the reduction of legal burden of proof in IPR disputes. Min Seo from the Ministry of Justice moderated a panel of eight members, which offered an in-depth discussion on the revised bill.
A ceremony for “The Third Future Strategy Award” was also held at the symposium. Yeon-Soo Park, former Administrator of the National Emergency Management Agency, received the award for his work on the Northeast Asian International Business Center City Project which enabled the construction of Incheon International Airport and Songdo International City.
2015.04.09 View 11054 -
Novel Photolithographic Technology Enabling 3D Control over Functional Shapes of Microstructures
Professor Shin-Hyun Kim and his research team in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST have developed a novel photolithographic technology enabling control over the functional shapes of micropatterns using oxygen diffusion.
The research was published online in the March 13th issue of Nature Communications and was selected as a featured image for the journal.
Photolithography is a standard optical process for transferring micropatterns on to a substrate by exposing specific regions of the photoresist layer to ultraviolet (UV) light. It is used widely throughout industries that require micropatterns, especially in the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
Conventional photolithography relied on photomasks which protected certain regions of the substrate from the input UV light. Areas covered by the photomasks remain intact with the base layer while the areas exposed to the UV light are washed away, thus creating a micropattern. This technology was limited to a two-dimensional, disc-shaped design as the boundaries between the exposed and roofed regions are always in a parallel arrangement with the direction of the light.
Professor Kim’s research team discovered that: 1) the areas exposed to UV light lowered the concentration of oxygen and thus resulted in oxygen diffusion; and 2) manipulation of the diffusion speed and direction allowed control of the growth, shape and size of the polymers. Based on these findings, the team developed a new photolithographic technology that enabled the production of micropatterns with three-dimensional structures in various shapes and sizes.
Oxygen was considered an inhibitor during photopolymerization. Photoresist under UV light creates radicals which initialize a chemical reaction. These radicals are eliminated with the presence of oxygen and thus prevents the reaction. This suggests that the photoresist must be exposed to UV light for an extended time to completely remove oxygen for a chemical reaction to begin.
The research team, however, exploited the presence of oxygen. While the region affected by the UV light lowered oxygen concentration, the concentration in the untouched region remained unchanged. This difference in the concentrations caused a diffusion of oxygen to the region under UV light.
When the speed of the oxygen flow is slow, the diffusion occurs in parallel with the direction of the UV light. When fast, the diffusion process develops horizontally, outward from the area affected by the UV light. Professor Kim and his team proved this phenomenon both empirically and theoretically. Furthermore, by injecting an external oxygen source, the team was able to manipulate diffusion strength and direction, and thus control the shape and size of the polymer. The use of the polymerization inhibitors enabled and facilitated the fabrication of complex, three-dimensional micropatterns.
Professor Kim said, “While 3D printing is considered an innovative manufacturing technology, it cannot be used for mass-production of microscopic products. The new photolithographic technology will have a broad impact on both the academia and industry especially because existing, conventional photolithographic equipment can be used for the development of more complex micropatterns.” His newest technology will enhance the manufacturing process of three-dimensional polymers which were considered difficult to be commercialized.
The research was also dedicated to the late Professor Seung-Man Yang of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST. He was considered one of the greatest scholars in Korea in the field of hydrodynamics and colloids.
Picture 1: Featured Image of Nature Communications, March 2015
Picture 2: Polymers with various shapes and sizes produced with the new photolithographic technology developed by Professor Kim
2015.04.06 View 10775