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Quantum Mechanical Calculation Theory Developed
An Electron Density Functional Calculation Theory, based on the widely used quantum mechanical principles and yet accurate and with shortened calculation period, was developed by Korean research team. *Electron Density Functional Calculation Theory: Theory that proves that it is possible to calculate energy and properties with only simple wave equations and electron densities. The research was conducted by Professor Jeong Yoo Sung (Graduate School of EEWS) and Professor William Goddard with support from WCU Foster Project initiated by Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and Korea Research Foundation. The result was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal. The research team corrected the error when performing quantum calculations that arises from the length of calculation time and incorrect assumptions and developed a theory and algorithm that is more accurate and faster. The use of wave equations in quantum mechanical calculations results in high accuracy but there is a rapid increase in calculation time and is therefore difficult to implement in large molecules with hundreds, or thousands of atoms. By implementing a low electron density variable with relatively less calculation work, the size of calculable molecule increases but the accuracy decreases. The team focused on the interaction between electrons with different spins to improve upon the speed of calculation in the conventional accurate calculation. The team used the fact that the interaction between electrons with different spins increases as it comes closer together in accordance with the Pauli’s Exclusion Principle. In addition the interaction between electrons are local and therefore can ignore the interactions between far away electrons and still get the total energy value. The team also took advantage of this fact and developed the algorithm that decreased calculation time hundredth fold. Professor Jeong commented that, “So far most of the domestic achievements were made by focusing on integrative researches by calculation science and material design communities but these involved short time frames. In areas that required lengthy time frames like fundamentals and software development, there was no competitive advantage. However this research is significant in that a superior solution was developed domestically”.
2012.01.31
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Using Light to Deliver Drugs to the Brain
The cerebral blood vessels have a unique blood-brain barrier. Using this unique structure, Professor Choi Chul Hee (Department of Bio-Brain Engineering) developed a technique to deliver drugs safely to the brain using lasers to alter the diffusivity of the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier allows the entry of only those drugs related to metabolic functions which made the entry of other drugs difficult. Due to this property it was difficult to administer the drug to a patient and have it affect the patient. Therefore the question was is it possible to maintain the effectiveness of the drug and allow it to pass through the barrier? The conventional method was to actually alter the structure of the drug or drill of small hole in the head and administering the drug directly, but these methods proved to be high risk and expensive. Professor Choi’s team used an ultra-short frequency laser beam on the barrier for 1/1000th of a second on the barrier to temporarily inhibit its function thereby allowing the drug to enter the brain safely.
2011.06.20
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South Korean scientists use laser to inject drugs into brain by Bernama.com, May 26, 2011
Bernama.com, the Malaysian national news agency, reported on the recent development by a KAIST research team of a safe and cheap treatment method for various neurological diseases. For details, please follow the link: http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=589195
2011.05.31
View 8896
KAIST MBA program was ranked 99th by Financial Times Global MBA Rankings 2011.
The Business School of KAIST in Seoul made the 99th placement among the top 100 business schools in the world, according to the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings 2011. The Hindustan Times, an English daily newspaper in India, brifely carried an article on this topic. For the article, please go to http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/656953.aspx. Financial Times Business Education and School Rakings 2011: http://www.ft.com/businesseducation/mba2011
2011.02.03
View 9503
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
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The 9th International Conference on Entertainment Computing Held, Sep 8-11, 2010
The cyber world is no longer an unrealistic place for a contemporary man who spends most of his time in front of a computer nowadays. The entertainment contents industry, which materializes the cyber world, leads the new knowledge economy and is emerging as a new growth engine for high value-added industry. Professionals in entertainment computing gathered to discuss how to make the cyber space more elaborate and entertaining. The 9th 2010 International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC) was held from September 8 to September 11 at Seoul COEX by KAIST and International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This year’s theme is “Creative and Innovative Science, Computing and Design for Digital and Entertainment Contents in 21C”, with fifteen global leaders of industry-university-institute collaboration speakers including George Joblove (Executive VP of Sony Pictures Technologies), Massimiliano Gasparri (VP of Warner Bros. Advanced Digital Services), Don Marinelli (Executive Producer of Entertainment Technology Center at University of Carnegie Mellon), Keith Devlin (Founding Executive Director of Stanford Media-X and Executive Director of Stanford H-STAR), Roy Ascott (President of Planetary Collegium). Speeches, paper sessions, workshops, exhibitions on the high-tech digital entertainment industry including computer graphics, cyber reality, telepresence, 3D/4D, mobile games, animation, special effects, robot design, content production and distribution, media art were held at the conference this year. This event was sponsored by IEEE, ACM, IPS, ADADA, Elsevier, ETRI, SK Telecom, KIISE, KMMS, HCI Korea, KCGS and KCGS.
2010.09.17
View 12082
QS World University Rankings 2010
QS World University Rankings 2010 was released on September 8, 2010, and KAIST has ranked 79th among the world’s top 100 universities. The Guardian published an article on the Rankings. “Cambridge ousts Harvard as world"s best university,” September 8, 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/08/cambridge-worlds-best-university-harvard
2010.09.08
View 10525
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 11694
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
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A new facility at KAIST opened on July 6, 2010.
Ryu Geun-Chul Sports Complelx will allow students, faculty and staff to pause a moment and exhale in the hustle and bustle of their daily lives. An opening ceremony celebrating the completion of a new facility for the KAIST family was held on July 6, 2010 at the campus. Had it not been for contributions of many people and organizations throughout the nation, among others, Dr. Geun-Chul Ryu, POSCO, Woori Bank, members of KAIST community, parents, and other citizens, it would be impossible to build the facility, said the university. The Complex, a three-story building with a basement, has an indoor court for basketball and volleyball with 3,000 individual seats, 200 meters of running track, indoor golf range, a fitness center, and other convenient facilities. Any members of KAIST community can visit the building and relax their body and mind stressed with work and study. It also provides a large space for ceremonial and cultural gatherings such as 2010 KAIST commencement ceremony. The official name of the building is “Ryu Geun-Chul Sports Complelx,” which was created in appreciation of Dr. Geun-Chul Ryu’s generous act who had donated 57.8 billion won worth of real estate to KAIST in August 2008.
2010.07.07
View 11530
KAIST's Mobile Harbor Program Attracts Two Corporate Investments
KAIST-developed Mobile Harbor Program has attracted investments from Korea"s two big-name industrial corporations, university authorities said on Monday (Oct. 19). KAIST has recently signed an agreement with Hyundai Wia Corp., a machine parts supplier, to collaborate in the researches of the mobile harbor programs and commercialization. Under the agreement, Hyundai WIA will invest a total of 7.5 billion won in the program for two years starting from January 2010. KAIST has also received a letter of intent from the Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. on investing 20 billion won in the commercialization of the project. The Mobile Harbor Program is designed to create mobile units that can go out to the ship which are anchored off-shore and unload the cargo and take it to where it is needed. It is aimed at overcoming the shortcomings of the current maritime container transportation systems. Container ships are getting larger and larger, requiring deep waters, large and complex loading and unloading systems, and major investments in facilities. Prof. Byung-Man Kwak, leader of the program"s R&D team, said: "With the investment from two global industrial companies, the program has gained a crucial momentum. The development of the program is expected to help Korea to become a global leader in marine transportation and maintain its supremacy in shipbuilding."
2009.10.20
View 13767
KAIST Secures Top Ranking of Korean Universities
KAIST won the No. 1 position for the second year in a row in the daily JoongAng Ilbo"s university rankings for 2009. Seoul National University took back the No. 2 spot, followed in order by POSTECH, Korea and Yonsei universities. The survey was conducted in the four categories, educational environment/finance, professors" research, general reputation/social advancement and globalization. KAIST scored 293 points out of possible 400 this year, while the second-ranking SNU and third-ranking POSTECH earned 234 and 226 points, respectively. The daily noted that KAIST particularly excelled in the category of educational environment/finance. It observed that donations to KAIST surged almost 100 times for the past three years since 2006 when President Suh took office. In specific rankings of universities by academic disciplines, SNU came in first overall. KAIST topped in the science and engineering field, while Korea University ranked first in liberal arts studies. This year, 88 four-year universities participated in the survey. The daily JoongAng Ilbo started its annual evaluation of Koran universities in 1994 to stimulate productive competition among institutions of higher learning and to provide objective standards for students and their parents to select schools for application. For more information, news.joins.com/article/391/3789391.html
2009.09.24
View 13162
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