Intel
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AI Graduate School to Take the Lead in Shaping the Future of AI
KAIST opened its AI Graduate School on August 26 with its first cohort of 22 Master’s and 10 PhD students for the 2019 fall semester. The new graduate school will provide students with a multidisciplinary curriculum incorporating the five key fields of healthcare, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, security, and emerging technologies, and will offer 18 courses this semester.
KAIST was selected as one of the first three AI graduate schools that the Korean government will financially endorse to nurture top-tier AI specialists. The government will provide 9 billion KRW and KAIST will invest an additional 4.2 billion KRW in the school over the next five years.
KAIST aims to foster top-tiered AI engineers who will work for advancing emergent technologies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The school will produce original technologies by driving high-risk, innovative AI research projects and will be the main supplier of highly competent engineers who will lead the industry and advance the global market.
KAIST has a long history of AI research and has a top-level AI education and research infrastructure. In 1990, KAIST launched the first AI research center in Korea. Since then, KAIST has taken the lead in the field by making breakthroughs in intelligent sensing information systems and AI platforms. About 20 percent of the faculty members at KAIST, or about 120 professors, are conducting AI-related research while offering 136 AI-related courses.
The Dean of the AI Graduate School, Song Chong, said, “Our faculty members are the cream of the crop and are all in their early 40s. Although we started with only eight professors, we will employ 20 full-time professors by 2023 and will spare no effort to make the world’s best AI research hub and develop the brightest minds.”
Dean Chong said that three professors are already listed in the top ten when measured by the number of publications from the top two AI conferences, Neural Information Processing System (NIPS) and ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning). KAIST has several highly recognized faculty members who have published more than 10 NIPS/ICML papers over nine years, winning numerous awards including the ACM Sigmetrics Rising Star Award, Google AI Focused Research Award, and INFORMS Applied Probability Best Publication Award.
The number of students attempting to gain admission to the school is also very high. The admission office said that the percentage of applicants being offered admission stood at 9.1 percent. From next year, the school plans to increase the number of enrollments to 40 Master’s and 20 PhD students.
The school will also open the AI Graduate School Research Center in Songnam City next month and expand its collaboration with local companies in the Songnam and Pangyo region, both emerging techno and ICT valleys. With the placement of 60 research personnel in the center, the school plans to play a leading role in building the companies’ technical competitiveness.
The government’s keen interest was well highlighted with the attendance of many dignitaries including the Mayor of Daejeon City Tae-Jong Huh, Vice Minister of Science and ICT Won-Ki Min, and National Assemblyman Sang-Min Lee.
KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin stressed the importance of AI as a growth engine, saying, “AI will be a game changer and a key enabler of major industries. But the winner takes all in industry. Therefore, without producing the world’s top technology, we will not survive in the global market. To foster highly competitive specialists who will take the lead in this industry, we will educate students who can converge multiple disciplines and contribute to national growth and beyond in the years ahead.”
2019.08.27 View 6595 -
FIRIC-EU JRC Joint Workshop on Smart Specialization
The Fourth Industrial Revolution Intelligence Center (FIRIC) at KAIST discussed ‘Smart Specialization’ for regional innovation and economic growth in the wake of the Fourth Industrial Revolution during the workshop with the EU Joint Research Center (EU-JRC) in Seville, Spain last week. The two sides also agreed to sign an MOU to expand mutual collaboration.
KAIST’s FIRIC was founded in cooperation with the World Economic Forum in July 2017 to carry out policy research for the promotion of science and technology-based inclusive growth and innovation and to lead related global efforts. The EU-JRC has committed to developing cohesive policies that aim to narrow regional gaps within the European Union. Founded in 1958 in Brussels, the EU-JRC has long been in charge of EU strategies for regional innovation based on emerging technologies.
The workshop also covered issues related to public-private partnerships and innovation clusters from the perspective of the EU and Asia, such as the global value chain and the implementation of industrial clusters policy amid the changes in the industrial ecosystem due to digitalization, automation, and the utilization of robotics during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
In addition, the session included discussions on inclusive growth and job market changes in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, addressing how Smart Specialization and the outcomes of the 4IR will shift the paradigm of current job and technology capabilities, as well as employment issues in many relevant industries. In particular, the actual case studies and their related policies and regulatory trends regarding the potential risks and ethical issues of artificial intelligence were introduced.
Regarding the financial services that utilize blockchain technologies and the establishment of public sector governance for such technologies, the participating experts noted difficulties in the diffusion of blockchain-based local currencies or public services, which call for a sophisticated analytical and practical framework for innovative and transparent governance.
Dr. Mark Boden, the Team Leader of the EU-JRC, introduced the EU’s initiatives to promote Smart Specialization, such as its policy process, governance design, vision sharing, and priority setting, with particular emphasis on targeted support for Smart Specialization in lagging regions. Professor So Young Kim, who is the dean of the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy and FIRIC’s Deputy Director said, “KAIST’s global role regarding the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be expanded in the process of exploring and developing innovative models of technology-policy governance while working jointly with the EU-JRC.”
2019.08.02 View 7602 -
'Flying Drones for Rescue'
(Video Credit: ⓒNASA JPL)
< Team USRG and Professor Shim (second from the right) >
Having recently won the AI R&D Grand Challenge Competition in Korea, Team USRG (Unmanned System Research Group) led by Professor Hyunchul Shim from the School of Electrical Engineering is all geared up to take on their next challenges: the ‘Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Subterranean Challenge (DARPA SubT Challenge)’ and ‘Lockheed Martin’s AlphaPilot Challenge’ next month.
Team USRG won the obstacle course race in the ‘2019 AI R&D Grand Challenge Competition’ on July 12. They managed to successfully dominate the challenging category of ‘control intelligence.’ Having to complete the obstacle course race solely using AI systems without any connection to the internet made it difficult for most of the eight participating teams to pass the third section of the race, and only Team USRG passed the long pipeline course during their attempt in the main event. They also demonstrated, after the main event, that their drone can navigate all of the checkpoints including landing on the “H” mark using deep learning.
Their drone flew through polls and pipes, and escaped from windows and mazes against strong winds, amid cheers and groans from the crowd gathered at the Korea Exhibition Center (KINTEX) in Goyang, Korea. The team was awarded three million KRW in prize money, and received a research grant worth six hundred million KRW from the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT).
“Being ranked first in the race for which we were never given a chance for a test flight means a lot to our team. Considering that we had no information on the exact size of the course in advance, this is a startling result,” said Professor Shim. “We will carry out further research with this funding, and compete once again with the improved AI and drone technology in the 2020 competition,” he added.
The AI R&D Grand Challenge Competition, which was first started in 2017, has been designed to promote AI research and development and expand its application to addressing high-risk technical challenges with significant socio-economic impact.
This year’s competition presented participants with a task where they had to develop AI software technology for drones to navigate themselves autonomously during complex disaster relief operations such as aid delivery.
Each team participated in one of the four tracks of the competition, and their drones were evaluated based on the criteria for each track. The divisions were broken up into intelligent context-awareness, intelligent character recognition, auditory intelligence, and control intelligence.
Team USRG’s technological prowess has been already well acclaimed among international peer groups. Teamed up with NASA JPL, Caltech, and MIT, they will compete in the subterranean mission during the ‘DARPA SubT Challenge’.
Team CoSTAR, as its name stands for, is working together to build ‘Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient Robots.’ Professor Shim emphasized the role KAIST plays in Team CoSTAR as a leader in drone technology.
“I think when our drone technology will be added to our peers’ AI and robotics, Team CoSTAR will bring out unsurpassable synergy in completing the subterrestrial and planetary applications. I would like to follow the footprint of Hubo, the winning champion of the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge and even extend it to subterranean exploration,” he said.
These next generation autonomous subsurface explorers are now all optimizing the physical AI robot systems developed by Team CoSTAR. They will test their systems in more realistic field environments August 15 through 22 in Pittsburgh, USA. They have already received funding from DARPA for participating.
Team CoSTAR will compete in three consecutive yearly events starting this year, and the last event, planned for 2021, will put the team to the final test with courses that incorporate diverse challenges from all three events. Two million USD will be awarded to the winner after the final event, with additional prizes of up to 200,000 USD for self-funded teams.
Team USRG also ranked third in the recent Hyundai Motor Company’s ‘Autonomous Vehicle Competition’ and another challenge is on the horizon: Lockheed Martin’s ‘AlphaPilot Challenge’. In this event, the teams will be flying their drones through a series of racing gates, trying to beat the best human pilot. The challenge is hosted by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor and the maker of the famed F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters, with the goal of stimulating the development of autonomous drones. Team USRG was selected from out of more than 400 teams from around the world and is preparing for a series of races this fall, beginning from the end of August.
Professor Shim said, “It is not easy to perform in a series of competitions in just a few months, but my students are smart, hardworking, and highly motivated. These events indeed demand a lot, but they really challenge the researchers to come up with technologies that work in the real world. This is the way robotics really should be.”
(END)
2019.07.26 View 12495 -
President Shin Shares Innovation Strategy at Moscow
President Sung-Chul Shin shared the recipe for success for rapid national development through university education during the Island 10-22 Conference held at the Skolov Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow on July 16.
President Shin stressed how urgent it is for higher education to rapidly embrace the new global economic environment brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution in his keynote address entitled ‘Roles and Responsibilities of Universities for Rapid National Development’.
The Island 10-22 Conference is a summit co-organized by the National University of Science and Technology MISIS and University of the National Technological Initiative 2035 and supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. More than 30 world-renowned experts, presidents of leading technological universities including President Peretz Lavie from the Israel Institute of Technology Technion, President Scott Pulsipher from Western Governors University and specialists in big data participated in the conference as speakers and discussed a diverse spectrum of ideas for making innovations and digital transformations in universities. More than 1,600 participants joined the conference.
During his keynote speech, President Shin explained how Korea has achieved such rapid economic growth over the past half century. He cited the Korean government’s vision and innovation policies as factors leading to Korea’s phenomenal success. KAIST, one of the results of the Korean government’s innovation policy, led the nation to advanced technological breakthroughs in industries such as semiconductors. Such visionary policies and investments in science, technology, and education eventually made the Korea of today possible.
President Shin said that KAIST distinguished itself through its new vision of C3 that fosters intellectual creativity, caring for others, and a challenging mind . Under Vision 2031, a blueprint for becoming a leading global university, President Shin said the KAIST continues to strive for innovations in convergent education,research and entreprenurship.
2019.07.18 View 6858 -
Education Innovation Day Reaffirms Rewarding of Excellence
Professors Tae-Eog Lee and Il-Chul Moon from the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering received the Linkgenesis Best Teacher Award and the Soo-Young Lee Teaching Innovation Award on May 10. They were each awarded with 10 million KRW in prize money during the Education Innovation Day ceremony held at the Chung Kun-mo conference hall.
The award was endowed by KAIST Alumni Scholarship Chairman Hyung-Kyu Lim and KAIST Foundation Chairman Soo-Young Lee to support the innovation initiative and acknowledge faculty members who made significant contributions to educational innovation and benefited the general public though their innovations.
“KAIST’s vision for excellence and commitment to innovation is a game changer. Educational innovation is one of five pillars of Vision 2031, and it is our priority to foster critical and creative thinking students,” said President Sung-Chul Shin at the ceremony. All the awardees made presentation on their innovative projects and shared their ideas on better pedagogical methodology for next generation.
Professor Lee, dean of the KAIST Academy and the head of the Center for Excellence in Learning & Teaching was recognized for his contribution to enhancing educational quality through innovative learning and teaching methodology development. He has set up an Education 3.0 Initiative, an online education platform for flipped learning at KAIST.
Professor Moon also upgraded the online education platform to the 4.0 version and extended KAIST’s massive online courses through KOOC framework. This open platform offers more than 62 courses, with more than 170 thousand users registered since 2014.
Professor Song-Hong Park from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering and Professor Jae-Woo Lee from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering also won the Excellence Award.
2019.05.10 View 8894 -
Professor Ji-Hyun Lee Awarded the Sasada Prize
Professor Ji-Hyun Lee from the Graduate School of Culture Technology was awarded the Sasada Prize during the 24th annual Conference of Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) held in Wellington, New Zealand on April 15.
The Sasada Award honors the late Professor Tsuyoshi Sasada (1941-2005), the former Professor of Osaka University and co-founder and fellow of CAADRIA. It is given to an individual who has contributed to the next generation of researchers and academics, to the wider profession and practice in computer-aided design and research, and has earned recognition in the academic community.
Professor Lee was recognized for her development of CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design) through her research work on the land price precision system using case-based reasoning. Her research team proposed a model for estimating the average apartment price in an administrative district after collecting 40 variables from the six major Korean cities, excluding Seoul and Ulsan. Their follow-up studies showed the possibility of replacing existing experts’ predictions.
Professor Lee has been steadily researching for 20 years on case-based reasoning (CBR), a field of artificial intelligence, and has published more than 40 papers in the field of CBR. Meanwhile, the CAAD Future 2019 event will be held at KAIST in June.
2019.04.23 View 7002 -
The Future Mobility of the Year 2019
KAIST announced the Future Mobility of the Year (FMOTY) 2019. The winners are Volvo 360C, Toyota e-Palette, and Toyota Concept-i WALK.
FMOTY are the first awards that recognizes concept cars that exhibit innovative services and practical transportation technology in three categories: private mobility, public and commercial mobility, and personal mobility.
Figure 1. The winner in the private mobility division, the Volvo 360C
In the private mobility division, the award went to the Volvo 360C. With targeted routes of roughly 186 miles, this vehicle has an ambitious service goal to replace airplanes by traveling these routes with great comfort. Goro Okazaki, a journalist with Car and Driver Japan, said, “The Volvo 360C clearly shows how highly personalized autonomous driving can change the future.”
Figure 2. The winner in the public mobility division, the Toyota e-Palette
The Toyota e-Palette was the winning car in commercial mobility division. This vehicle provides the best solution as a mobile service platform by transforming itself into mobile hospitals, hotels, stores and food trucks. Carlo Calderón, a journalist for Autopista Spain, said, “It has a great strength in remodeling its indoor and outdoor spaces according to various commercial uses.”
Figure 3. The winner in the personal mobility division, the Toyota Concept-i WALK
In the personal mobility division, the award went to the Toyota Concept-i WALK. It was recognized for having an exquisite user environment and artificial intelligent agent, along with an excellent completion. Jun Miao, a journalist with MJ CarShow China, said, “It is aesthetically pleasing. Beyond the upright control of conventional personal mobility, it allows agile control with a joystick.”
FMOTY conducted a screening process for 45 concept cars over three months and 16 renowned automotive experts from 11 countries participated as judges for this award, including Editor in Chief of BBC Top Gear Magazine Charlie Turner and European Bureau Chief of Automobile Magazine Georg Kacher. The judges said that FMOTY was born to propose a new aspect of future mobility, and in terms of evaluating technical and social values of concept cars, FMOTY carries great significance.
Kyung-soo Kim, Dean of the Cho Chun Shik Graduate School of Green Transportation said, “Globally renowned experts in the automotive field participated as judges to elevate the prestige and fairness of the awards. KAIST members were excluded from the entire judging process. I believe that the FMOTY Awards will expand public attention from the present to the future.”
Details can be found on the official website of FMOTY ( www.fmoty.org ).
2019.03.11 View 7093 -
KAIST Develops Analog Memristive Synapses for Neuromorphic Chips
(Professor Sung-Yool Choi from the School of Electrical Engineering)
A KAIST research team developed a technology that makes a transition of the operation mode of flexible memristors to synaptic analog switching by reducing the size of the formed filament. Through this technology, memristors can extend their role to memristive synapses for neuromorphic chips, which will lead to developing soft neuromorphic intelligent systems.
Brain-inspired neuromorphic chips have been gaining a great deal of attention for reducing the power consumption and integrating data processing, compared to conventional semiconductor chips. Similarly, memristors are known to be the most suitable candidate for making a crossbar array which is the most efficient architecture for realizing hardware-based artificial neural network (ANN) inside a neuromorphic chip.
A hardware-based ANN consists of a neuron circuit and synapse elements, the connecting pieces. In the neuromorphic system, the synaptic weight, which represents the connection strength between neurons, should be stored and updated as the type of analog data at each synapse.
However, most memristors have digital characteristics suitable for nonvolatile memory. These characteristics put a limitation on the analog operation of the memristors, which makes it difficult to apply them to synaptic devices.
Professor Sung-Yool Choi from the School of Electrical Engineering and his team fabricated a flexible polymer memristor on a plastic substrate, and found that changing the size of the conductive metal filaments formed inside the device on the scale of metal atoms can make a transition of the memristor behavior from digital to analog.
Using this phenomenon, the team developed flexible memristor-based electronic synapses, which can continuously and linearly update synaptic weight, and operate under mechanical deformations such as bending.
The team confirmed that the ANN based on these memristor synapses can effectively classify person’s facial images even when they were damaged. This research demonstrated the possibility of a neuromorphic chip that can efficiently recognize faces, numbers, and objects.
Professor Choi said, “We found the principles underlying the transition from digital to analog operation of the memristors. I believe that this research paves the way for applying various memristors to either digital memory or electronic synapses, and will accelerate the development of a high-performing neuromorphic chip.”
In a joint research project with Professor Sung Gap Im (KAIST) and Professor V. P. Dravid (Northwestern University), this study was led by Dr. Byung Chul Jang (Samsung Electronics), Dr. Sungkyu Kim (Northwestern University) and Dr. Sang Yoon Yang (KAIST), and was published online in Nano Letters (10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b04023) on January 4, 2019.
Figure 1. a) Schematic illustration of a flexible pV3D3 memristor-based electronic synapse array. b) Cross-sectional TEM image of the flexible pV3D3 memristor
2019.02.28 View 9566 -
Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence in Robots
(from left: PhD candidate Su Jin An, Dr. Jee Hang Lee and Professor Sang Wan Lee)
Research groups in KAIST, the University of Cambridge, Japan’s National Institute for Information and Communications Technology, and Google DeepMind argue that our understanding of how humans make intelligent decisions has now reached a critical point in which robot intelligence can be significantly enhanced by mimicking strategies that the human brain uses when we make decisions in our everyday lives.
In our rapidly changing world, both humans and autonomous robots constantly need to learn and adapt to new environments. But the difference is that humans are capable of making decisions according to the unique situations, whereas robots still rely on predetermined data to make decisions.
Despite the rapid progress being made in strengthening the physical capability of robots, their central control systems, which govern how robots decide what to do at any one time, are still inferior to those of humans. In particular, they often rely on pre-programmed instructions to direct their behavior, and lack the hallmark of human behavior, that is, the flexibility and capacity to quickly learn and adapt.
Applying neuroscience in robotics, Professor Sang Wan Lee from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST and Professor Ben Seymour from the University of Cambridge and Japan’s National Institute for Information and Communications Technology proposed a case in which robots should be designed based on the principles of the human brain. They argue that robot intelligence can be significantly enhanced by mimicking strategies that the human brain uses during decision-making processes in everyday life.
The problem with importing human-like intelligence into robots has always been a difficult task without knowing the computational principles for how the human brain makes decisions –in other words, how to translate brain activity into computer code for the robots’ ‘brains’.
However, researchers now argue that, following a series of recent discoveries in the field of computational neuroscience, there is enough of this code to effectively write it into robots. One of the examples discovered is the human brain’s ‘meta-controller’, a mechanism by which the brain decides how to switch between different subsystems to carry out complex tasks. Another example is the human pain system, which allows them to protect themselves in potentially hazardous environments. “Copying the brain’s code for these could greatly enhance the flexibility, efficiency, and safety of robots,” Professor Lee said.
The team argued that this inter-disciplinary approach will provide just as many benefits to neuroscience as to robotics. The recent explosion of interest in what lies behind psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, and addiction has given rise to a set of sophisticated theories that are complex and difficult to test without some sort of advanced situation platform.
Professor Seymour explained, “We need a way of modelling the human brain to find how it interacts with the world in real-life to test whether and how different abnormalities in these models give rise to certain disorders. For instance, if we could reproduce anxiety behavior or obsessive-compulsive disorder in a robot, we could then predict what we need to do to treat it in humans.”
The team expects that producing robot models of different psychiatric disorders, in a similar way to how researchers use animal models now, will become a key future technology in clinical research.
The team also stated that there may also be other benefits to humans and intelligent robots learning, acting, and behaving in the same way. In future societies in which humans and robots live and work amongst each other, the ability to cooperate and empathize with robots might be much greater if we feel they think like us.
Professor Seymour said, “We might think that having robots with the human traits of being a bit impulsive or overcautious would be a detriment, but these traits are an unavoidable by-product of human-like intelligence. And it turns out that this is helping us to understand human behavior as human.”
The framework for achieving this brain-inspired artificial intelligence was published in two journals, Science Robotics (10.1126/scirobotics.aav2975) on January 16 and Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.12.012) on February 6, 2019.
Figure 1. Overview of neuroscience - robotics approach for decision-making. The figure details key areas for interdisciplinary study (Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences)
Figure 2. Brain-inspired solutions to robot learning. Neuroscientific views on various aspects of learning and cognition converge and create a new idea called prefrontal metacontrol, which can inspire researchers to design learning agents that can address various key challenges in robotics such as performance-efficiency-speed, cooperation-competition, and exploration-exploitation trade-offs (Science Robotics)
2019.02.20 View 6217 -
KAIST Earns AACSB Business School Accreditation
The KAIST College of Business re-earned business school accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International. The school first earned the accreditation in 2003, and has continued to receive the accreditation four consecutive times. Currently only 5% of the 16,000 business schools around the world have earned AACSB accreditation. KAIST received a good evaluation for the competitive research of its faculty, its executive education programs based on strong industry-academia ties, and specialized MBA and master’s program, which includes programs such as social entrepreneurship and green business and policy.Alexander Triantis, dean of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and a judge for AACSB Accreditation said, “I was impressed to see students from KAIST have a high standard of knowledge. A number of its graduates continue to be appointed as professors of top universities abroad, which shows its strong global competence”. AACSB was founded in 1916 by deans of business colleges from prestigious universities such as Harvard University, Stanford University and Columbia University, to provide business and accounting accreditation to universities. Evaluation for AACSB accreditation takes place every five years. Schools are evaluated based on fifteen standards, including student admission and graduation requirements, student-faculty ratios, faculty’s intellectual contributions, research infrastructure, global cooperation, and industry-academia programs. They can be eligible for re-accreditation if they satisfy the conditions offered by AACSB International and are committed to continuous improvement every five years. KAIST also earned the accreditation from the European Foundation for Management Development Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) three consecutive times since 2010. In 2013, it earned membership into the Partnership in International Management (PIM). Membership is only possible for those who have AACSB and EQUIS accreditation and they can be listed as a candidate school through voting. The candidate schools can finally earn membership after one year of strict screening. As of January 2019, there are 65 prestigious graduate schools of business, including KAIST, listed as PIM members.
2019.02.01 View 6104 -
AI-based Digital Watermarking to Beat Fake News
(from left: PhD candidates Ji-Hyeon Kang, Seungmin Mun, Sangkeun Ji and Professor Heung-Kyu Lee)
The illegal use of images has been a prevalent issue along with the rise of distributing fake news, which all create social and economic problems. Here, a KAIST team succeeded in embedding and detecting digital watermarks based on deep neural learning artificial intelligence, which adaptively responds to a variety of attack types, such as removing watermarks and hacking. Their research shows that this technology reached a level of reliability for technology commercialization.
Conventional watermarking technologies show limitations in terms of practicality, technology scalability, and usefulness because they require a predetermined set of conditions, such as the attack type and intensity. They are designed and implemented in a way to satisfy specific conditions.
In addition to those limitations, the technology itself is vulnerable to security issues because upgraded hacking technologies are constantly emerging, such as watermark removal, copying, and substitution.
Professor Heung-Kyu Lee from the School of Computing and his team provided a web service that responds to new attacks through deep neural learning artificial intelligence. It also serves as a two-dimensional image watermarking technique based on neural networks with high security derived from the nonlinear characteristics of artificial neural networks. To protect images from varying viewpoints, the service offers a depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) three-dimensional image watermarking technique.
Lastly, they provided a stereoscopic three-dimensional (S3D) image watermarking technique that minimizes visual fatigue due to the embedded watermarks. Their two-dimensional image watermarking technology is the first of its kind to be based upon artificial neural works. It acquires robustness through educating the artificial neural networking on various attack scenarios.
At the same time, the team has greatly improved on existing security vulnerabilities by acquiring high security against watermark hacking through the deep structure of artificial neural networks. They have also developed a watermarking technique embedded whenever needed to provide proof during possible disagreements.
Users can upload their images to the web service and insert the watermarks. When necessary, they can detect the watermarks for proof in any dispute.
Moreover, this technology provides services, including simulation tools, watermark adjustment, and image quality comparisons before and after the watermark is embedded.
This study maximized the usefulness of watermarking technology by facilitating additional editing and demonstrating robustness against hacking.
Hence, this technology can be applied in a variety of contents for certification, authentication, distinction tracking, and copyrights. It can contribute to spurring the content industry and promoting a digital society by reducing the socio-economic losses caused by the use of various illegal image materials in the future.
Professor Lee said, “Disputes related to images are now beyond the conventional realm of copyrights. Recently, their interest has rapidly expanded due to the issues of authentication, certification, integrity inspection, and distribution tracking because of the fake video problem. We will lead digital watermarking research that can overcome the technical limitations of conventional watermarking techniques.”
This technology has only been conducted in labs thus far, but it is now open to the public after years of study. His team has been conducting a test run on the webpage (click).Moving forward from testing the technology under specific lab conditions, it will be applied to a real environment setting where constant changes pervade.
1. Figure. 2D image using the watermarking technique: a) original image b) watermark-embedded image c) signal from the embedded watermark
Figure 2. Result of watermark detection according to the password
Figure 3. Example of a center image using the DIBR 3D image watermarking technique: a) original image b) depth image c) watermark-embedded image d) signal from the embedded watermark
Figure 4. Example of using the S3D image watermarking technique: a) original left image b) original right image c) watermark-embedded left image d) watermark-embedded right image e) signal from the embedded watermark (left) f) signal from the embedded watermark (right)
2018.12.05 View 5182 -
KAIST Shows Strong Performance in Crypto Contest Korea 2018
(Awardees at the ceremony for Crypto Contest Korea 2018)
A paper titled “Indifferentiability of Truncated Random Permutations” by PhD candidate Wonseok Choi and MS candidate Byeonghak Lee (under Professor Jooyoung Lee) from the KAIST Graduate School of Information Security (GSIS) won first place in Crypto Contest Korea 2018. Byeonghak Lee became a repeat winner since his paper titled “Tweakable Block Ciphers Secure Beyond the Birthday Bound in the Ideal Cipher Model” also received an award at Crypto Contest Korea 2017.
The contest, hosted by the Korea Cryptography Forum, the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology, and the National Security Research Institute and sponsored by the National Intelligence Service, was held for promoting cryptography in Korea. The total prize money is fifty million won with ten million won going to the first place winners.
The contest was divided into three divisions: paper, problem solving, and idea. Among the three divisions, first place came from the paper division only.
Besides first place, KAIST students showed outstanding performance in the contest. PhD candidate Seongkwang Kim received participation prize while he also received special prizes with MS candidate Yeongmin Lee. The hacking club GoN (under Professor Sang Kil Cha), comprised of undergraduate students from the GSIS was awarded the grand prize in the division of problem solving.
The award ceremony was held during the Future Crypto Workshop 2018 on November 15. The awards ceremony for Crypto Expert Korea 2018 were also held there, and PhD candidate Ji-Eun Lee from the School of Computing and Byeonghak Lee received awards, the grand prize and runner-up prize respectively.
2018.11.27 View 8467