Kenya
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KAIST Plans to Open a New York Campus
President Lee signs an MOU with New York-based Big Continent Inc. Chairman Hee-Nam Bae on funding the New York campus
President Kwang Hyung Lee announced a plan to open a KAIST campus in New York with funding from New York-based entrepreneur Hee-Nam Bae. President Lee and Big Continent Inc. Chairman Hee-Nam Bae signed the MOU last week for the funding to open the campus in New York.
President Lee said it will take years to open up a campus in New York in order to conform with both Korean and US legal procedures. However, during a news conference in New York following the signing of the MOU with Chairman Bae, President Lee said this is the first step toward realizing KAIST’s new vision of a ‘Global Twin Strategy’ by making New York KAIST’s newest stronghold to target both domestic and global markets.
“New York is the center of the world’s commerce, culture, and new technologies. If we want to grow big, we should go to one of the biggest cities in the world and New York is the place. I highly encourage our students and faculty go into the world and never be satisfied enjoying the top position in Korea. The next place to investigate will be Silicon Valley,” said President Lee.
“We still have many issues to resolve domestically. We need to discuss more details first with the Board of Trustees and the Korean government,” he added.
The New York campus will aim to become an enterprise-type university to help KAIST create global value. "Our goal is to make sure that Korean businesses gain competitiveness in the global market and can become listed on the NASDAQ. We plan to open majors related to AI, financial engineering, and cultural technologies. We will recruit students from both the US and KAIST to study at our New York campus.” President Lee said.
Chairman Bae, a self-made entrepreneur who immigrated to the US in 1981, also leads the Global Leadership Foundation in the US. “President Lee and I have already toured several candidate sites for the campus in the New York region and we will make a final decision on the best site to purchase,” said Chairman Bae.
Chairman Bae added that he has always dreamed of fostering young global talents who will take on global challenges with pioneering minds. He believes KAIST shares this global vision.
The New York campus will be the first KAIST campus for global students funded by someone from the private sector. This is also a major step forward for KAIST, which was founded by a six million dollar USAID loan in 1971. KAIST announced its plans to establish Kenya KAIST in 2018 with funding from the Korea Eximbank’s 95 million USD development cooperation fund loan to the Kenyan government. KAIST will provide turn-key-based education consultancy featuring curriculum design and the construction of facilities for Kenya’s first advanced science and technology institute. The campus will be located in the Konza Techno City near Nairobi and plans to open in 2023.
2021.12.13 View 6979 -
KAIST International Symposium Highlights the Value of Science through Global Collaboration
The presidents of three premier science and technology universities shared their belief that universities should move forward to embrace social changes while maintaining the importance of academics for future generations during the KAIST International Symposium on February 16.
The symposium, one of the events to celebrate KAIST’s 50th anniversary, highlighted the future role of universities over the next 50 years by hosting a panel featuring ETH Zurich President Joël Mesot, Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum, and KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin. Members of the foreign diplomatic corps representing seven countries also explored the new model of global collaboration in the second session.
President Rosenbaum of Caltech said that even though society is changing, the role of universities will not be different since the value of knowledge will always be important. He said that universities must embrace change.
He said that universities should move forward fearlessly if they believe it would impact wider society positively. He added that universities should also be courageous enough to take a new path based on longer-term perspectives and lessons learned from successes. One of the roles of universities is to establish various hypotheses and possible prospects, raise doubts, and go forward with a strong will for the future generations to come.
He cited LIGO (the Laser Inerferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), as a good example of a successful university-research collaboration. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation in the US and operated by Caltech and MIT. Approximately 1300 scientists from around the world, including the Max Planck Society in Germany and the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK, participate in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. In 2019, the international team of scientists detected the collision of two black holes with masses about 142 times the mass of the sun in the most massive collision ever detected. MIT Physicist Rainer Weiss shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Professor Barry Barish and Professor Kip Thorn from the Department of Physics at Caltech in recognition of their contribution to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
President Mesot of ETH Zurich stressed that universities should foster young talents well versed with creative thinking and entrepreneurship in this new era. He also said that COVID-19 has reaffirmed the importance of science and global collaborations beyond borders to address global challenges such as pandemics. President Mesot said COVID-19 has taught us the value of science and R&D, adding that the roll-out of a vaccine in only one year would have been impossible without the decades-long R&D foundation that universities and industries have established.
He also gave the example of the MRI as a reason universities should provide strong basic science research foundation. In 1944 in the US, Dr. Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. The MRI research inspired many ETH professors for further studies and led them to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952 for their MRI basic theory and in 1991 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with the development of high-resolution spectroscopy. “The MRI first started 80 years ago and still applies in today’s medicine. We should focus on research which will keep such value,” President Mesot said.
Meanwhile President Shin also said that the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has been deemed the "winner takes all" era. At this highly competitive time, R&D activities are more meaningful if they produce the world’s best, first, and only outcomes.
“We aim to achieve excellence in research with long-term innovative research support systems. We will conduct R&D activities that will lead the megatrends of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: hyper-connectivity, super-intelligence, and meta-convergence. In addition, we will double down to conduct forward-looking flagship research that will enhance the happiness and prosperity of all humanity in the areas of global warming, infectious diseases, bio-medicine, energy and environment, smart technology, and post-AI.”
Responding to one of the student’s question about what mindsets are expected of students enrolled in government-funded national universities, President Mesot made three suggestions. First, they should remember that they are privileged, so they should give back their talents to society. They should also be patient with what they are doing even when they don’t achieve the desired results. Lastly, they should remain open to new ideas and be flexible when encountering disruptions.
Seven diplomats stationing in Korea including Rob Rapson, US Charge d’Affairs ad Interim Rob Rapson, UAE Ambassador Abdulla Saif Al Nuaimi, Kenyan Ambassador Mwende Mwinzi, Danish Ambassador Einar Jensen, Pakistani Ambassador Mumtaz Zahar Baloch, Egyptian Ambassador Haem Fahmy, and UK Ambassador Simon Smith joined the second session themed KAIST for the Global Community.
They all agreed that KAIST is one of the shining examples of successful international collaboration stemming from the international aid loan from USAID. Five decades later, KAIST now is working to help the Kenyan government to establish Kenya KAIST with a 95-million US funding from the Korea Exim Bank.
While stressing the importance of global collaboration for inclusive growth in the global community, the seven diplomats gave their insights on the newly transforming global environment intertwined with COVID-19 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
In the face of global changes caused by emerging technologies and carbon neutrality, the ambassadors expressed a strong desire to make collaborations between KAIST and their countries to propel new innovations in industry and education in their countries.
2021.02.17 View 7755 -
KAIST Seals the Deal for Kenya KAIST Project
KAIST will participate in Kenya’s strategic economic development plan under the provision of a turnkey-based science and technology education consultancy for the establishment of the Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kenya KAIST).KAIST signed the contract on November 30 with the Konza Technopolis Development Authority to establish Kenya KAIST. Korea Eximbank will offer a 95 million USD loan to the Kenyan government for this project. The project will include the educational and architectural design and construction of Kenya KAIST. The campus will be constructed in the Konza Techno City nearby Nairobi by 2021, with the first batch of 200 graduate students starting classes in 2022. KAIST, in consortium with Samwoo and Sunjin architecture and engineering companies, will take the lead of the three-year project, with the kick-off ceremony planned at the end of next January in Nairobi. The Kenyan government plans to transform Kenya into a middle-income country under Vision 2030 through promoting science, technology, and innovation for national economic growth. Nicknamed Africa’s Silicon Savannah, Konza Techno City is a strategic science and technology hub to realize this vision. To this end, the medium-term plan set a goal to provide specialized research and training in various leading-edge engineering and advanced science fields.In the two-phase evaluation of the consultancy bidding, KAIST won preferred bidder status in the technical proposal evaluation, outbidding three other Korean consortia. Invited to the financial proposal bidding, the KAIST consortium successfully completed month-long contract negotiations with Kenya last week.KAIST will develop academic curricula for six initial departments (Mechanical Engineering, Electrical/Electronic Engineering, ICT Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Agricultural Biotechnology), which will lay the ground work for engineering research and education in Kenya to meet emerging socioeconomic demands. In addition, KAIST will provide the education of basic sciences of math, physics, chemistry, and biology for students.It is also notable that the Kenyan government asked to develop an industry-academy cooperation program in Konza Techno City. It reflects the growing industrial needs of Kenya KAIST, which will be located in the center of the Konza Technopolis. It is anticipated that the technopolis will create 16,675 jobs in the medium term and over 200,000 after completion, positioning Kenya as an ICT hub within the region.KAIST also shares a similar history of establishment with Kenya KAIST, as it will be built with a foreign loan. KAIST, created by the Korean government in 1971 to drive the economic engine through advancement of science and technology with a six-million USD loan from USAID, has now become a donor institution that hands down science and technology education systems including the construction of campuses to underdeveloped countries.The successful case of KAIST has been benchmarked by many countries for years. For instance, KAIST set up the curriculum of the nuclear engineering program at the Khalifa University of Science and Technology in UAE in 2010. In China, Chongqing University of Technology is running its electrical engineering and computer science programs based on the educational systems and curricula offered by KAIST from 2015. In October, KAIST also signed an MOU with the Prince Mohammad Bin Salman College of Cyber Security, AI, and Advanced Technologies in Saudi Arabia to provide the undergraduate program for robotics.Among all these programs benchmarking KAIST, Kenya KAIST clearly stands out, for it is carrying out a turnkey-based project that encompasses every aspect of institution building ranging from educational curriculum development to campus construction and supervision.President Sung-Chul Shin is extremely excited about finalizing the deal, remarking, “It is of great significance that KAIST’s successful development model has carved out a unique path to becoming a global leading university that will benefit other countries. In only a half century, we have transitioned from a receiver to a donor institution, as the country itself has done.”“KAIST will spare no effort for Kenya KAIST to become a successful science and technology university that will play a crucial role in Kenya’s national development. I believe Kenya KAIST will be an exemplary case of an ODA (Official Development Assistance) project based on the development of science and technology to benefit underdeveloped countries,” he added.
2018.12.03 View 8469