Campus/People
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Professor Lee Recognized by the KMS as Best Paper Awardee
Professor Ji Oon Lee of the Department of Mathematical Sciences was selected as the 2017 Best Paper Awardee by the Korean Mathematical Society. The award will be presented during the KMS spring meeting on April 29. Dr. Lee is being honored for proving a necessary and sufficient condition for the Tracy-Wisdom law of Wigner matrices. In a paper titled ‘A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Edge Universality of Wigner Matrices,’ he proposed a solution for one of the many unanswered problems in the field of random matrix theory that have existed for decades. The paper, co-authored with Professor Jun Yin at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, was published in the Duke Mathematical Journal in 2014. Professor Lee joined KAIST in 2010 after finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard University. He was named a ‘POSCI Science Fellow’ and received the ‘Young Scientist Award’ from the KMS in 2014.
2017.04.27 View 9983 -
Seeking a New Economic and Industrial Paradigm
The School of Humanities & Social Science will offer the open lecture course titled ‘Seeking a New Economic and Industrial Paradigm’ from May11 to June 7. This is part of a quarterly lecture series run by the school and open to the public.
The open lecture is designed to provide opportunities for the public to identify future challenges and opportunities for Korea’s economy and industry. Experts in macroeconomics, finance, and global collaboration will provide glimpses of new directions for each sector as well as megatrends of emerging technologies on the heels of the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Jin Hyuk Yoo from the Bank of Korea will speak on the ‘Outlook and Challenges of the Korean Economy.’ He will identify the current economic situation and explain how to build on sustainable long-term economic growth in the opening course.
Won-Bin Lee of the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade will present on the ‘New Industrial Policy in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ His lecture will focus on fostering the local industry and creating its own ecosystem for furthering regional industries.
Dong-Hoon Lee of Donga ST will speak on the implications that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring about in the medical industry. Won-Suk Choi of FnPricing will introduce the FN business model, presenting the risks and benefits of fintech in his lecture ‘Finance: Human and Technology.’
Jae-Hong Choi of the Institute of International Development Cooperation at Korea University will give a talk titled ‘Toward the World through Global Cooperation.’ He will present on the history of Korea’s global cooperation initiatives and the role of KOICA, introducing its emerging economic and industrial cooperation model.
Professor Jeounghoon Kim, who is responsible for the public lecture program, said, “Korea now faces very diverse social economic and industrial challenges and we seem to be lost while searching for a solution. The public will have an opportunity to understand the current economic situation and its industrial implications.”
For registration and more info, please visit http://hss.kaist.ac.kr.
2017.04.26 View 8858 -
Professor Jinah Park Received the Prime Minister's Award
Professor Jinah Park of the School of Computing received the Prime Minister’s Citation Ribbon on April 21 at a ceremony celebrating the Day of Science and ICT. The awardee was selected by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and Korea Communications Commission.
Professor Park was recognized for her convergence R&D of a VR simulator for dental treatment with haptic feedback, in addition to her research on understanding 3D interaction behavior in VR environments. Her major academic contributions are in the field of medical imaging, where she developed a computational technique to analyze cardiac motion from tagging data.
Professor Park said she was very pleased to see her twenty-plus years of research on ways to converge computing into medical areas finally bear fruit. She also thanked her colleagues and students in her Computer Graphics and CGV Research Lab for working together to make this achievement possible.
2017.04.26 View 10333 -
Professor Duck-Joo Lee Awarded the 21st Century Grand Prize
Professor Duck-Joo Lee of the Department of Aerospace Engineering was awarded the 21st Century Grand Prize in the field of technology development by the New Industry Management Academy and the 21st Leaders Club on April 13.
Professor Lee was honored in recognition of his contribution to the helicopter industry. He played a part in domestic helicopter development projects including the KUH-1 Surion (Korean Attack Helicopter), a twin-engine, transport utility helicopter as well as LAH (Light Armed Helicopter) and LCH (Light Civil Helicopter) projects.
Since joining KAIST in 1988, Professor Lee supervised more than 26 PhDs and 27 MSs. He was responsible for hosting the 1st Asian-Australian Rotorcraft Forum and Exhibition and currently serves as vice president of the American Helicopter Society and the Korea Drone Industry Promotion Association. He also participated in open online courses on K-MOOC and Coursera.
(Caption: Professor Lee (second from left in the first row) poses after receiving the award.)
2017.04.26 View 8456 -
FinTech Conference by KAIST, EDHEC-Risk Institute, Princeton, and Tsinghua
KAIST will partner with EDHEC-Risk Institute, Princeton University, and Tsinghua University to host a series of annual rotation conference on FinTech. The inaugural conference will be held in Princeton on April 26 and is entitled ‘Four-University Rotating FinTech Conference: Wealth Management Systems for Individual Investors.’
The conference will facilitate discussion among all interest parties of academics, practitioners, and regulators from around the world. Professor Woo Chang Kim of the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering will represent KAIST. Professor Kim is also the head of the Center for Wealth Management Technologies at KAIST.
In addition to Professor Kim, leading experts from the US, Asia, and Europe will present at the conference, including Andrew Yao (Turing Award recipient and founder of IIIS FinTech Center at Tsinghua University), John Bogle (founder of the Vanguard Group, and president of the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center), Lionel Martellini (director of EDHEC-Risk Institute), John Mashey (Bell Labs/Silicon Valley computer scientist/corporate executive), and John Mulvey (professor and founding member of the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University).
This year’s conference will feature following sessions:
· Mass-Customization of Goal-Based Investment Solutions: The New Frontier in Digital Wealth Management Services
· Goal-Based Investment via Multi-Stage Stochastic Goal Programming for Robo-Advisor Services
· Big Data – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
· Applying Machine Learning Concepts for Asset Allocation and ALM
· FinTech: Drawing Strengths from Computing Theories
· Savings and Investing to Achieve Retirement Goals: An Update Given Current Market Assumptions · The Rise of Robo-Advisors: A Threat or an Opportunity for the Wealth Management Industry?
The conference will include the participation of official partner Samsung Asset Management.
2017.04.20 View 9814 -
Newdin Contents Donates 'Strikezon'
Newdin Contents, an online and mobile game maker, made a gift of ‘Strikezon' to KAIST on April 19. The screen game valued at 100 million KRW will be placed in the lobby of the School of Computing, enriching the diverse physical activity options for the KAIST community. The donation was made at a ceremony attended by KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin, the CEO of the Newdin, Hyo-Kyum Kim, and Head of the School of Computing Professor Myoung Ho Kim.
At the Strikezon, students can enjoy mini baseball games indoors including a batting challenge and a pitching mode indoors for free.
President Shin thanked Mr. Kim of Newdin Contents, saying the donation will be a stepping stone for possible mutual collaborations which will play a synergistic role for technological development. Mr. Kim noted, “We are very pleased to donate the program to KAIST, which is the alma mater of Joon-Mo Hwang, the developer of Strikezon.” He added that Newdin Contents will make every effort to produce advanced game products with state of the art technology.
(Photo caption:President Sung-Chul Shin hits the ball at the Strikezon on April 19.)
2017.04.19 View 5410 -
2017 Summer Nuclear Nonproliferation Education Program
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Education and Research Center (NEREC) at KAIST announced its 30 scholarship recipients for the 2017 Summer Nuclear Nonproliferation Education Program on April 18. The six-week program, starting from July 10, will be run in Korea, Japan, and China.
The program provides young global scholars with focused and challenging nuclear nonproliferation studies. Young scholars will be exposed to diverse science and technology policies and practices concurrently conducted in many countries and the future direction for enhancing nuclear nonproliferation. They will participate in a series of seminars, projects, international conferences, and field trips.
Since its launch in 2014, the program has educated 71 young scholars. This year, more than 150 scholars from 37 countries applied for the program, reflecting the growing reputation of the program both at home and abroad. The director of the NEREC, Professor Man-Sung Yim of the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering at KAIST said that young scholars from very prestigious foreign universities have shown strong interest in the program. According to Professor Yim, this year’s recipients are from 26 universities from 16 countries including Harvard University, Oxford University, the National Research Nuclear University of Russia, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology
2017.04.19 View 9268 -
Dr. Sejong Kim Cited as Young Scientist by the KPS
Dr. Sejong Kim, a graduate of KAIST, was cited as the Young Scientist of Optics and Quantum Electronics by the Korean Physical Society (KPC) at the 2017 KPC Spring Meeting on April 19.
Dr. Kim, now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Technology Sydney, was recognized for the award based on her outstanding research of photonic crystals. She has published articles in Nano Letters, Advanced Materials, Optics Letters, and Optics Express 3 as the first author and co-first author. She also won the silver prize at the Samsung HumanTech Paper Award in the field of Physical Devices and Science as the first author in 2013, one of the most prestigious scientific paper awards in Korea.
2017.04.18 View 3609 -
Professor Otfried Cheong Named as Distinguished Scientist by ACM
Professor Otfried Cheong (Schwarzkopf) of the School of Computing was named as a Distinguished Scientist of 2016 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The ACM recognized 45 Distinguished Members in the category of Distinguished Scientist, Educator, and Engineer for their individual contributions to the field of computing. Professor Cheong is the sole recipient from a Korean institution. The recipients were selected among the top 10 percent of ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and five years of continuous professional membership.
He is known as one of the authors of the widely used computational geometry textbook Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications and as the developer of Ipe, a vector graphics editor. Professor Cheong joined KAIST in 2005, after earning his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1992. He previously taught at Ultrecht University, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Eindhoven University of Technology.
2017.04.17 View 8516 -
KOOC Provides New Insights on Open Online Courses
KAIST’s free open online courses with innovative education modules are gaining a great deal of public attention. To reflect the increasing demand, KAIST will expand the number of courses offered via the KAIST Massive Open Online Course (KOOC) system from the five courses currently available to 12 courses from April 17. More courses will reportedly be offered in the second semester.
According to KOOC service team, more than 15,000 people enrolled in KOOCs since its opening last May. They said the ever increasing number of enrollment reflects the wide public interest to experience the high standard of the curriculum taught by KAIST faculty. The service team reported that they felt the need to diversify the curriculum in response to increasing enrollment. The new courses will span from the introduction to chemical engineering, to game theory, to writing research papers.
They also said that KAIST’s innovative education modules focusing on self-driven learning have drawn wide attention from the public. In the KOOCs, enrolled students can proactively engage in online Q&A discussions with professors. Currently, the KOOCs are only run in Korean, but the Introduction to Data Structure and Algorithms will be run in English with Korean subtitles.
The subjects of 2017 KOOCs are as follow:
-Introduction to Operations Research
-Light, Color, and Life
-Introduction to Chemical Engineering
-Introduction to the Application of AI/DM Technology I & II
-How to Write Research Papers
-Game Theory
-Optimization Techniques for Computer Vision
-Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms I & II
-Sensor Engineering-Principles of Sensing Technology and Sensor Design
For more on the KOOCs, please visit http://kooc.kaist.ac.kr
2017.04.14 View 3973 -
Scholarship in Memory of Professor Shin Endowed by His Family
Professor Joong-Hoon Shin of the Graduate School of Nanoscience and Technology was touted as a genius young scientist who would take the lead in nanoscience technology. After earning degrees from Harvard and the Caltech, he was appointed at KAIST at age 27. He was the youngest professor ever appointed in Korea.
Professor Shin’s outstanding research in the field of semiconductor nano-optics led him to be named as the ‘Scientist of the Year’ for three consecutive years from 2004 by the most prestigious scientist and technology organizations including the Korean Academy Science and Technology, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Korean government. However, a fatal car accident last September on the way home from a seminar in Gangwon Province took his life and a promising scholar’s research was left unfinished. He was 47 years old.
Mrs. Young-Eun Hong, the widow of the late Professor Shin, made a 100 million KRW gift to KAIST to establish the ‘Joong-Hoon Shin Scholarship’ on April 7. The scholarship will provide financial assistance to outstanding students of physics and nanoscience.
At the donation ceremony attended by President Sung-Chul Shin, Professor Shin’s colleagues and students, and family members, Mrs. Hong said, “My family would like to help young students achieve their dreams on behalf of my husband. I hope students will remember my husband’s passion and dedication toward his studies for a long time. He was a very hard worker.”
Working at KAIST, Professor Shin made significant achievements in field of semiconductor nano-optics, specializing in silicon photonics and silicon nanocrystal structures. In particular, his research team gained attention reproducing the structure of ‘Morpho butterfly’ wings, which produce the same colors from various angles, using external light as a light source without extra power. Their research led to the creation of original technology dubbed the biomimetics reflective display and was published in Nature in 2012.
Professor Shin’s legacy still endures. In February, a research team under Professor Shin-Hyun Kim of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering includingthe late Professor Shin’s doctoral student Seung Yeol Lee, posthumously dedicated their research published on Advanced Materials to Professor Shin. ( click )
KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin, who is also a physicist, said “His passing is a great loss to the whole scientific and technology community, at home and abroad. But Joong-Hoon Shin scholarship will enable the growth and ensure the strength of nanoscience and its education at KAIST. We will uphold Professor Shin’s legacy by doing our best to make KAIST a world-leading university which can create global value.”
Mrs. Hong said she will continue her husband’s academic legacy at his alma maters, Harvard and the Caltech, where he earned his BS in physics and his Ph.D. in applied physics respectively. She said she will start fundraising to establish the Joong-Hoon Shin Scholarship at Harvard and Caltech from July.
(Mrs. Hong poses with President Sung-Chul Shin after donating 100 million KRW for establishing 'Joong-Hoon Shin Scholarship' in memory of her husband on April 7.)
2017.04.10 View 8422 -
Professor Won Do Heo Receives 'Scientist of the Month Award'
Professor Won Do Heo of the Department of Biological Sciences was selected as the “Scientist of the Month” for April 2017 by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National Research Foundation of Korea.
Professor Heo was recognized for his suggestion of a new biological research method developing various optogenetics technology which controls cell function by using light. He developed the technology using lasers or LED light, without the need for surgery or drug administration, to identify the cause of diseases related to calcium ions such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
The general technique used in optogenetics, that control cells in the body with light, is the simple activation and deactivation of neurons.
Professor Heo developed a calcium ion channel activation technique (OptoSTIM1) to activate calcium ions in the body using light. He also succeeded in increasing calcium concentrations with light to enhance the memory capacity of mice two-fold.
Using this technology, the desired amount and residing time of calcium ion influx can be controlled by changing light intensity and exposure periods, enabling the function of a single cell or various cells in animal tissue to be controlled remotely.
The experimental results showed that calcium ion influx can be activated in cells that are affected by calcium ions, such as normal cells, cancer cells, and human embryonic stem cells. By controlling calcium concentrations with light, it is possible to control biological phenomena, such as cellular growth, neurotransmitter transmission, muscle contraction, and hormone control.
Professor Heo said, “Until now, it was standard to use optogenetics to activate neurons using channelrhodopsin. The development of this new optogenetic technique using calcium ion channel activation can be applied to various biological studies, as well as become an essential research technique in neurobiology.
The “Scientist of the Month Award” is given every month to one researcher who made significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology with their outstanding research achievement. The awardee will receive prize money of ten million won.
2017.04.07 View 9124