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Professor Bae of Industrial Design Wins Good Design Award.
Professor Bae Sang Min’s research team of the Industrial Design Department received a G-Mark on the Product Design Section from the Good Design Awards 2010 organized by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization through the exhibition of a Green Sharing Project, Heartea.
Heartea is a tumbler that allows the user to easily know the temperature of the liquid contained inside. Heartea is a name that combines Heart and Tea to refer to a tumbler that contains heart-warming tea.
Heartea was designed and produced by Professor Bae’s research team and was funded by GS Caltex. World Vision selected charity targets and oversaw distribution, and all of the sales income (about 200 million won) was donated as a scholarship to teenagers with financial difficulties.
The project has begun in 2006, and its accumulative sales are 1.7 billion won. Twenty million won is donated to 147 teenagers every year as scholarship, and through annual sharing camp, social leaders mentor teenagers to help them achieve their dreams.
The Good Design Award organized annually by Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization has a fifty year tradition and is one of the world’s top four design contests with 6,000 submissions from 50 different countries participated.
Professor Bae’s team has won three of the top four design contests including the German Red Dot Product Award and the American IDEA Product Award.
Along with Heartea, both of foldable MP3 in 2008 and natural humidifier Lovepot in 2009 won an award from these four contests.
“Through continuous research, I hope to create the world’s best philanthropy design research center to help Third World countries and the neglected. I want to participate in creating a better world through design,” said Professor Bae.
2010.11.05 View 11154 -
Minister of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia Visited KAIST to Sign Agreement on Joint Research Projects
Khaled bin Mohammad Al-Anqari, the Minister of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia, visited KAIST on October 26th to conclude a joint agreement with KAIST.
The group of Saudi Arabian visitors included Abdullah bin Abdularhman Al-Othman, President of the King Saud University, Osama bin Sadiq Tayeb, President of King Abdulaziz University, and Khalid bin Salih Al-Sultan, President of the best Saudi Arabian technological university, King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minerals.
Through research agreement between KAIST and the King Saud University and King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minerals, joint research projects, mutual visitations of research professors, interchange of academic programs, joint seminars and scientific societies will be held to promote the lively interchange between higher education institutions of Korea and Saudi Arabia.
In particular, King Saud University and KAIST has signed an agreement on joint research projects in the fields of “Solar-Ocean Thermal Exchange Desalination,” “Develop New Energy Management Service for Residential and Commercial Customers Using Smart Metering and Sensor Network Information” and “Superior Production of Lactic Acid from Saudi Dates Using Bioprocess Technology.”
The projects will be funded by the Saudi Arabian government, and their scope will be determined in the future
“Compared to the robust industrial economic interactions between the Middle East and Korea, the interchange of the two countries’ higher education institutions has been poor,” said Jong Hyun Kim, Visiting Professor of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering Department of KAIST who will be conducting one of the joint programs with the Electrical Engineering Department of the King Saud University. “Like this joint research, I hope KAIST will, in many different ways, lead the way in cooperating and interacting with higher education institutions of the Middle EAST.”
Al-Anquari, Minister of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia, who showed great interest in KAIST’s innovative research and high technology development, expressed his will to put more effort into extending the interchange between universities of Saudi Arabia and of Korea, including KAIST.
2010.11.03 View 14150 -
Nanowerk Spotlight: Bacteria as environmentally friendly nanoparticle factories, Sep. 24, 2010
The Nanowerk.com is a leading portal site for nanotechnology and nanosciences, which runs a daily news section called “Spotlight.” On September 24, 2010, the Spotlight published an article on the latest developments of the research by a KAIST team headed by Distinguished Professor Sang-Yup Lee of the Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering Department. For the article, please click the link below:
Nanowerk Spotlight: Bacteria as environmentally friendly nanoparticle factories, Sep. 24, 2010
By Michael Berger.
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=18188.php
2010.09.25 View 10005 -
KAIST was invited to the World Economic Forum's fourth "Summer Davos."
KAIST attended the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos Forum” held from September 13 to 15 in Tianjin, China. The Summer Davos Forum hosted various sessions and meetings with international dignitaries from governments, business and public organizations, and academia on the main theme of “Driving Growth through Sustainability.”
On September 14, four subjects including “Electric Vehicles,” “Humanoid Robotics,” “Next Generation of Biomaterials,” and “New Developments in Neuroengineering” were presented by KAIST, followed by discussions with forum participants.
Professor Jae-Seung Jeong of the Bio and Brain Engineering Department, Sang-Yup Lee of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department, Joon-Ho Oh of the Mechanical Engineering Department, and President Nam-Pyo Suh participated in the forum as presenters of the topic. Of these speakers, Professors Jae-Seung Jeong and Sang-Yup Lee were nominated by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as members of the “Young Global Leader” and “Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies,” respectively.
President Suh was also invited to the CEO Insight Group and delivered an opening speech on OLEV (Online Electric Vehicle) and the Mobile Harbor. President Suh plans to sign an MOU for research cooperation with Jong-Hoo Kim of Bell Lab and Shirley Jackson of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the near future, respectively.
Since 2007, the WEF, in charge of the world’s largest international conference called “Davos Forum” has hosted a “Summer Davos Forum,” also called as the “Annual Meeting of New Champions.” The Summer Davos Forum consists of nations, rising global companies, next generation of global leaders, and cities or nations that lead technological innovations. Unlike the annual Davos Forum held in January, the “Annual Meeting of New Champions” is held in September of each year in Tianjin and Dalian, China.
Since 2009, the WEF has added a special session called IdeasLab in the Davos and Summer Davos Forums. Through IdeasLab, prominent universities from all over the world, research organizations, venture businesses, NGOs, and NPOs are invited to exchange and discuss innovative and creative ideas that can contribute to the development of mankind. Until now, universities including INSEAD, EPFL-ETH, MIT, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tsinghua University, and Keio University have been invited to the IdeasLab. KAIST is the first Korean university to attend this session.
2010.09.17 View 17556 -
South Koreans Develop High-Performance Software Router.
HPC Wire, covering news on computing software, hardware, networking, storage, tools and applications, published an article on the development of high-performance router by a KAIST research team.
The research team consisted of the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, KAIST, presented PacketShader, a high-performance software router framework for general packet processing with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. PacketShader, the research team said, that exploits the massively-parallel processing power of GPU to address the CPU bottleneck in current software routers.
For the article, please click the link: http://www.hpcwire.com/news/South-Koreans-Develop-High-Performance-Software-Router-101401434.html
2010.08.25 View 9667
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Nature Photonics, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, released a paper written by a KAIST research team on the time-of-flight measurement.
Professor Seung-Woo Kim of the Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST, and his research team published the result of their study on the measurement of 1 nanometer (nm) precision.
“The time-of-flight of light pulses has long been used as a direct measure of distance, but state-of-the-art measurement precision using conventional light pulses or microwaves peaks at only several hundreds of micrometers. Here, we improve the time-of-flight precision to the nanometer regime by timing femtosecond pulses through phase-locking control of the pulse repetition rate using the optical cross-correlation technique,” Professor Kim said.
According to the experiment conducted by the research team, “An Allan deviation of 117 nm in measuring a 700m distance in air at a sampling rate of 5 millisecond (ms) once the pulse repetition is phased-locked, which reduces to 7 nm as the averaging time increases to 1 second (s).”
When measuring an object located in a far distance, a laser beam is projected to the object, and the reflected light is analyzed; the light is then converted into an electric signal to calculate the distance. In so doing, Professor Kim said, the conventional method of measurement creates at least 1 mm of deviation.
He argues, “This enhanced capability is maintained at long range without periodic ambiguity, and is well suited to lidar applications. This method could also be applied to future space missions involving formation-flying satellites for synthetic aperture imaging and remote experiments related to general relativity theory."
Nature Photonics published the article online on August 8, 2010.
2010.08.18 View 10848 -
A graduating student speaks about "hope" for many disabled people who dare to have a dream of becoming a scientist.
Dong-Won Kim, a graduate student of the Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST, will leave for the US at the end of this month to further pursue his advanced degree at University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Harbor. He has completed his master’s program at KAIST this summer, specializing in rehabilitation engineering.
Mr. Kim was born with cerebral palsy, which made him difficult to talk and use his hands. Notwithstanding the obstacles, he went through the regular school system and earned a master’s degree offered by one of the toughest universities in Korea.
When asked about what was the most difficult thing to study, he said with a gentle smile that “other than taking him a longer time to solve a math problem because of his weak hand muscle, he doesn’t have any difficulties.”
“Of course, people around me helped me a lot, but I tried to maintain my confidence in me and did my best so as not to disappoint my family and friends who have supported me,” Mr. Kim added.
Professor Pyung-Hoon Chang of the Mechanical Engineering Department, who was an adviser to Mr. Kim, recalled,
“Dong-Won has been a great student; I was quite impressed with his intellectual vigor and academic passion. He got along well with his peer students and had always positive and can-do attitude. I’m really pleased to see him graduate, given the tough situation he’s been in. He sets an inspiring role model who overcame difficulties and achieved great accomplishments.”
Mr. Kim hopes that universities including KAIST improve their educational environment to adopt friendlier policies toward the people with disabilities so that more of them can be offered an opportunity to become a scientist or engineer.
He will study medical engineering at University of Michigan—through his doctoral study, he wishes to identify causes and improvements of disabilities suffered by people and become an expert in rehabilitation.
Mr. Kim also donated 1 million won to KAIST out of his appreciation for the support he had received during his stay at the school. He said, “Although this is a small amount, I’d like to “thank you” for the members of KAIST community including its faculty and staff who have encouraged me to finish the study. If possible, I’d like to make a greater contribution in the future, and to that end, I’ll study harder and try to become the person whom I have planned for.”
Upon hearing about his generosity, President Nam Pyo Suh said, “The gift is so wonderful because it was given to us from one of our students. I wish him great success in his future study and will look forward to having his valuable contributions to our school and the nation.”
2010.08.17 View 10056 -
Texas Instruments, Inc. Agreed for Collaborative Research with Professor Hai-Joon Yoo, the Electrical Engineering Department of KAIST
Professor Hai-Joon Yoo from the Electrical Engineering Department of KAIST made a research collaboration agreement with Texas Instruments (TI), Inc. in July 2010 to develop a “Many-core Processor Chip,” a chip that is designed to emulate a human brain.
TI, Inc. is an American company based in Dallas, Texas and renowned for developing and commercializing semiconductor and computer technology. The company is the 4th largest manufacturer of semiconductors worldwide, 2nd supplier of chips for cellular handsets, and 1st producer of digital signal processors and analog semiconductors, among a wide range of semiconductor products.
TI, Inc. has designated Professor Yoo’s lab as one of its official labs and promised to give financial supports for the lab—it has pledged to donate a total value of 300 million won of research fund and equipment to Professor Yoo. On July 21, 2010, the signboard hanging ceremony for the designation of a TI Lab was held at Professor Yoo’s lab.
Professor Yoo developed a neuro-circuit network to emulate a human brain by adopting a mixed mode circuit that has chips for analog and digital circuits. He then has conducted a research to graft the mixed mode circuit onto a Many-core Processor to integrate the human intelligence into a conventional single-core processor that can process one instruction at a time. The Many-core Processor, once developed, can be applied to various kinds of products such as an artificial intelligence surveillance camera, robot, smart car, and the like.
Professor Yoo has presented his research results at numerous international meetings and conferences, among other things, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), a global forum sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and Systems-on-a-Chip. The Conference offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC design to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading experts.
Professor Yoo is a senior member of IEEE and Chairman of ISSCC in Asia.
2010.08.05 View 11375 -
Bioengineers develop a new strategy for accurate prediction of cellular metabolic fluxes
A team of pioneering South Korean scientists has developed a new strategy for accurately predicting cellular metabolic fluxes under various genotypic and environmental conditions. This groundbreaking research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) on August 2, 2010.
To understand cellular metabolism and predict its metabolic capability at systems-level, systems biological analysis by modeling and simulation of metabolic network plays an important role. The team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee, focused their research on the development of a new strategy for more accurate prediction of cellular metabolism.
“For strain improvement, biologists have made every effort to understand the global picture of biological systems and investigate the changes of all metabolic fluxes of the system under changing genotypic and environmental conditions,” said Lee. The accumulation of omics data, including genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and fluxome, provides an opportunity to understand the cellular physiology and metabolic characteristics at systems-level. With the availability of the fully annotated genome sequence, the genome-scale in silico (means “performed on computer or via computer simulation.”) metabolic models for a number of organisms have been successfully developed to improve our understanding on these biological systems. With these advances, the development of new simulation methods to analyze and integrate systematically large amounts of biological data and predict cellular metabolic capability for systems biological analysis is important.
Information used to reconstruct the genome-scale in silico cell is not yet complete, which can make the simulation results different from the physiological performances of the real cell. Thus, additional information and procedures, such as providing additional constraints (constraint: a term to exclude incorrect metabolic fluxes by restricting the solution space of in silico cell) to the model, are often incorporated to improve the accuracy of the in silico cell.
By employing information generated from the genome sequence and annotation, the KAIST team developed a new set of constraints, called Grouping Reaction (GR) constraints, to accurately predict metabolic fluxes. Based on the genomic information, functionally related reactions were organized into different groups. These groups were considered for the generation of GR constraints, as condition- and objective function- independent constraints. Since the method developed in this study does not require complex information but only the genome sequence and annotation, this strategy can be applied to any organism with a completely annotated genome sequence.
“As we become increasingly concerned with environmental problems and the limits of fossil resources, bio-based production of chemicals from renewable biomass has been receiving great attention. Systems biological analysis by modeling and simulation of biological systems, to understand cellular metabolism and identify the targets for the strain improvement, has provided a new paradigm for developing successful bioprocesses,” concluded Lee. This new strategy for predicting cellular metabolism is expected to contribute to more accurate determination of cellular metabolic characteristics, and consequently to the development of metabolic engineering strategies for the efficient production of important industrial products and identification of new drug targets in pathogens.”
2010.08.05 View 12362 -
Native-like Spider Silk Produced in Metabolically Engineered Bacterium
Microscopic picture of 285 kilodalton recombinant spider silk fiber
Researchers have long envied spiders’ ability to manufacture silk that is light-weighted while as strong and tough as steel or Kevlar. Indeed, finer than human hair, five times stronger by weight than steel, and three times tougher than the top quality man-made fiber Kevlar, spider dragline silk is an ideal material for numerous applications. Suggested industrial applications have ranged from parachute cords and protective clothing to composite materials in aircrafts. Also, many biomedical applications are envisioned due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability.
Unfortunately, natural dragline silk cannot be conveniently obtained by farming spiders because they are highly territorial and aggressive. To develop a more sustainable process, can scientists mass-produce artificial silk while maintaining the amazing properties of native silk? That is something Sang Yup Lee at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, the Republic of Korea, and his collaborators, Professor Young Hwan Park at Seoul National University and Professor David Kaplan at Tufts University, wanted to figure out. Their method is very similar to what spiders essentially do: first, expression of recombinant silk proteins; second, making the soluble silk proteins into water-insoluble fibers through spinning.
For the successful expression of high molecular weight spider silk protein, Professor Lee and his colleagues pieced together the silk gene from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, and then inserted it into the expression host (in this case, an industrially safe bacterium Escherichia coli which is normally found in our gut). Initially, the bacterium refused to the challenging task of producing high molecular weight spider silk protein due to the unique characteristics of the protein, such as extremely large size, repetitive nature of the protein structure, and biased abundance of a particular amino acid glycine. “To make E. coli synthesize this ultra high molecular weight (as big as 285 kilodalton) spider silk protein having highly repetitive amino acid sequence, we helped E. coli overcome the difficulties by systems metabolic engineering,” says Sang Yup Lee, Distinguished Professor of KAIST, who led this project. His team boosted the pool of glycyl-tRNA, the major building block of spider silk protein synthesis. “We could obtain appreciable expression of the 285 kilodalton spider silk protein, which is the largest recombinant silk protein ever produced in E. coli. That was really incredible.” says Dr. Xia.
But this was only step one. The KAIST team performed high-cell-density cultures for mass production of the recombinant spider silk protein. Then, the team developed a simple, easy to scale-up purification process for the recombinant spider silk protein. The purified spider silk protein could be spun into beautiful silk fiber. To study the mechanical properties of the artificial spider silk, the researchers determined tenacity, elongation, and Young’s modulus, the three critical mechanical parameters that represent a fiber’s strength, extensibility, and stiffness. Importantly, the artificial fiber displayed the tenacity, elongation, and Young’s modulus of 508 MPa, 15%, and 21 GPa, respectively, which are comparable to those of the native spider silk.
“We have offered an overall platform for mass production of native-like spider dragline silk. This platform would enable us to have broader industrial and biomedical applications for spider silk. Moreover, many other silk-like biomaterials such as elastin, collagen, byssus, resilin, and other repetitive proteins have similar features to spider silk protein. Thus, our platform should also be useful for their efficient bio-based production and applications,” concludes Professor Lee.
This work is published on July 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) online.
2010.07.28 View 16760 -
Professor Thompson
Professor Mary Kathryn Thompson of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department wrote her regular column on correlation between art and engineering, “Engineers, Artists Not on Opposite Ends.” The column was published by the Korea Herald on July 23, 2010. For reading, please click the link below.
http://www.koreaherald.com/opinion/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20100722000548
2010.07.23 View 9543 -
The thermal fluctuation and elasticity of cell membranes, lipid vesicles, interacting with pore-forming peptides were reported by a research team at KAIST.
A research team from KAIST, consisted of Sung-Min Choi, Professor of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering Department, and Ji-Hwan Lee, a doctoral student in the Department, published a paper on the “thermal fluctuation and elasticity of lipid vesicles interacting with pore-forming peptides.” The paper was carried by Physical Review Letters, an internationally renowned peer-review journal on physics on July 16, 2010.
Cell membranes, which consist of lipid bilayers, play important roles in cells as barriers to maintain concentrations and matrices to host membrane proteins. During cellular processes such as cell fission and fusion, the cell membranes undergo various morphological changes governed by the interplay between protein and lipid membranes. There have been many theoretical and experimental approaches to understand cellular processes driven by protein-lipid membrane interactions. However, it is not fully established how the membrane elastic properties, which play an important role in membrane deformation, are affected by the protein-membrane interactions.
Antimicrobial peptides are one of the most common examples of proteins that modify membrane morphology. While the pore-forming mechanisms of antimicrobial peptides in lipid bilayers have been widely investigated, there have been only a few attempts to understand the mechanisms in terms of membrane elastic properties. In particular, the effects of pore formation on the membrane fluctuation and elastic properties, which provide key information to understand the mechanism of antimicrobial peptide activity, have not been reported yet. The research team reports the thermal fluctuation and elasticity of lipid vesicles interacting with pore-forming peptides, which were measured by neutron spin-echo spectroscopy.
The results of this study are expected to pay an important role in understanding the elastic behavior and morphological changes of cell membranes induced by protein-membrane interactions, and may provide new insights for developing new theoretical models for membrane fluctuations which include the membrane mediated interaction between protein patches.
(a) (b)
Figure
(a) Schematics for bound melittin and pores in lipid bilayers
(b) P NMR signal ratio (with/without Mn2+) of DOPC LUV-melittin vs P/L at 30˚C. The dashed line is a guide for eyes.
2010.07.23 View 11233