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KAIST Unveils Vision 2031, a Blueprint for KAIST's Future
(Participants at the Vision 2031 Declaration Ceremony pose after the ceremony on March 20.)
KAIST presented a blueprint for KAIST’s future, “Vision 2031” looking toward its 60th anniversary. The strategic development plan for a “Global Value-Creative Leading University” aims at being one of the top universities in the world by the year 2031.
Unveiling its 2031 Vision, KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin presented the three-stage, five-year action plan during a ceremony held on March 20.
He stressed that innovation in the five pillars of education, research, technology commercialization, globalization, and future strategy will further advance the excellence of KAIST, to help it become a trailblazer in Korea and beyond.
President Shin said that Vision 2031 holds a special meaning, as the full support of the KAIST community was garnered to complete this shared vision for KAIST.
Approximately 140 members of the Vision Committee participated in the brainstorming process over the past ten months for reaching this vision. The committee went through consensus building procedures of public hearings engaging all of the stakeholders on campus as well as outside experts. The committee published “Vision 2031: KAIST’s Future Report” this month, detailing the action plan of innovation strategies for reaching its new vision as well as an expanded budget funding plan to secure 2 trillion KRW by 2031, up from the current 860 billion KRW.
First, in education, KAIST will foster creative leaders who will translate the knowledge created by science and technology into social values. In research, KAIST will conduct research projects to address both national and global challenges. KAIST will pursue becoming an entrepreneurial university that will enrich its technological value. In globalization innovation, KAIST will move forward to serve as a world bridge. Lastly, KAIST will steer toward the ‘What’ (problem definition) over the ‘How’ (problem solving) for addressing challenges in pursuing future strategy innovation.
The ceremony was held in Chung Kunmo Hall, in the newly opened the Academic Cultural Complex, with an attendance of more than 300 distinguished guests including global leaders in higher education, government, and industry, as well as from KAIST community.
Noted participants from abroad included KAIST President’s Advisory Council members such as Former President of ETH Zurich Rlaph Eichler, President of HKUST Tony Chan, President-elect Kazuya Masu of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Former President of the National University of Singapore Tan Chorh Chuan, Nobel laureate Professor Kurt Wuthrich of the Scripps Research Institute, and Professor Klaus von Klitzing from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Former KAIST Presidents including Dr. Nam-Pyo Suh, Chairman of JoongAng Holdings Seok-hyun Hong, Elsevier Chairman Youngsuk Chi, KISWE Mobile Executive Chairman Jeong H. Kim also attended the ceremony.
In honor of the Vision 2031 declaration, KAIST is hosting 25 events during Vision Week from March 19 to 23 across the campus including academic forums, distinguished lectures, exhibits, and a coding challenge, among others. The opening of the Academic Cultural Center, an iconic building accommodating the new library, Cultural Building, and Vision Hall, launched Vision Week on Monday, March 19.
KAIST also dedicated Chung Kunmo Hall in the Academic Cultural Complex, a 300-seat capacity multi-purpose hall in honor of Professor Keun-Mo Chung, who played an instrumental role in founding KAIST in 1971.
Professor Chung submitted the proposal to US Aid to establish KAIST in 1969. US Aid asked the vice-president of Stanford University at the time, Frederick Terman, to conduct a feasibility study on the establishment of KAIST. The Terman Report, approving the founding of KAIST, was published in 1970 and KAIST was founded the next year. Following the dedication of Terman Hall in 2004, KAIST has now inducted its two founding figures.
“We had the guidebook of the Terman Report back then. We faithfully accomplished the initial mission and goals the Terman Report contained. At this critical juncture of the new global environment, we need to establish a new vision to continue to develop. As much as the Terman Report drove us to our current success, I hope the Vision 2031 KAIST Future Report will advance KAIST to its new chapter,” President Shin said.
Stressing that the ideal KAISTian is defined by the 3C spirit: Challenge, Creativity, and Caring, President Shin said, “Members of KAIST are expected to embrace challenges, generate creative ideas, and care for others. By recommitting to the five innovation strategies equipped with the KAIST spirit, KAIST will emerge as one of the top universities of science and technology by the year 2031 and contribute to the happiness and prosperity of humankind. I hope KAIST will be a great source of pride for Koreans and lay the foundation for Korea to take the lead in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
2018.03.20 View 6776 -
Open Online Course in Science and Technology, STAR-MOOC
Four universities specializing in science and technology, along with POSTECH and UST, teamed up to establish programs for innovation in education programs, responding to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
KAIST held an opening ceremony for the Science & Technology Advanced Research - Massive Open Online Course (STAR-MOOC) and signed an MoU with GIST, DGIST, UNIST, POSTECH, and UST.
STAR-MOOC was launched on February 26 to provide educational service to the public. It is a joint platform where people can take courses featuring lectures from professors from universities specializing in science and technology as well as national research universities.
It offers 15 courses covering basics, majors, and electives related to science and technology developed by the STAR-MOOC committee. Students can take a variety of courses.
At the opening ceremony, KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin, DGIST President Sang Hyuk Son, UST President Kil Choo Moon, POSTECH Vice President Wankyun Chung, UNIST Vice President Jae Sung Lee, GIST Vice President of Public Affairs Pil-hwan Park came to sign the MoU for provising educational services for the public.
During the ceremony, there was also time to introduce a technical agreement with a non-profit organization founded by NAVER, the CONNECT Foundation, for its courses and platform.
Universities participating in STAR-MOOC will put effort into capacity building in response to changes driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
President Shin said, “STAR-MOOC is a platform that provides science and technology courses from basics to electives and major courses. It will become a leading educational platform.”
Students can register and choose courses from the website (http://starmooc.kr).
2018.03.19 View 7510 -
The 8th KINC Fusion Research Awardees
The KAIST Institute for NanoCentury held the 8th KINC Fusion Research Award in order to encourage professors’ convergence studies and instill students’ willingness to research. The award ceremony took place in the KI Building at KAIST on March 13.
The KINC Fusion Research Award selects the most outstanding convergence studies among research undertaken last year, and awards researchers who participated in that research.
The 8th KINC Fusion Research Award went to Professor Yoon Sung Nam from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Inkyu Park from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Their research reported the spontaneous self-biomineralization of palladium (Pd) ions on a filamentous virus to form ligand-free Pd nanowires without reducing reagents or using additional surface stabilizers (Title: Virus-Templated Self-Mineralization of Ligand-Free Colloidal Palladium Nanostructures for High Surface Activity and Stability, Advanced Functional Materials (2017)).
Professor Hee-Tae Jung, the Director of KAIST Institute for the NanoCentury and the host of the KINC Fusion Research Award said, “Convergence will be the crucial keyword that will lead to revolutionary change. Hence, the importance of convergence study should be improved. We will put every effort into creating a research environment for increasing convergence study.
The KAIST Institute for the NanoCentury was established in June 2006 under the KAIST Institute with a mission of creating convergence study by tearing down boarders among departments and carrying out interdisciplinary joint research. Currently, approximately 90 professors from 14 departments participate the institute. It aims to become a hub of university institutes for nano-fusion research.
2018.03.19 View 10194 -
Professor Emeritus Jung Ki Park Won the IBA Technology Award 2018
(Professor Emeritus Jung Ki Park)
Professor Emeritus Jung Ki Park from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering received the IBA Technology Award from the International Battery Association (IBA).
IBA 2018 was held from March 11 to 16 on Jeju Island, which was the first time it was hosted in Korea. The conference was an excellent opportunity to let the world know the level of the Korean rechargeable battery industry and its technology.
Professor Park delivered his keynote speech titled Advances in Lithium Batteries in Korea at the conference and received the IBA Technology Award as the first Korean recipient.
Professor Park is a world-renowned scholar who was a groundbreaker in the rechargeable battery industry. He was recognized by the IBA Award Committee for his contributions carrying out research and development, fostering competent people, and enhancing the lithium rechargeable battery industry in Korea over the last 30 years.
Professor Park said, “It is my great honor to receive this award, which is the best international award in the field of rechargeable batteries. I would like to share this with my colleagues and students. As competition in the rechargeable industry intensifies, systemic cooperation among industries, academia, and government is needed for the continued development of the battery industry in Korea.
2018.03.19 View 5873 -
Scientist of March, Professor Hee-Seung Lee
(Professor Hee-Seung Lee)
Professor Hee-Seung Lee from the Department of Chemistry at KAIST received the ‘Science and Technology Award of the Month’ awarded by the Ministry of ICT and Science, and the National Research Foundation of Korea for March 2018.
Professor Lee has been recognized for successfully producing peptide-based molecular machines, which used to be made of metals.
The methodology can be translated into magnetotactic behavior at the macroscopic scale, which is reminiscent of magnetosomes in magnetotactic bacteria.
The team employed foldectures, self-assembled molecular architectures of β-peptide foldamers, to develop the peptide-based molecular machines that uniformly align with respect to an applied static magnetic field.
Professor Lee said, “Molecular machines are widely used in the field of medical engineering or material science; however, there were limitations for developing the machines using magnetic fields. By developing peptide-based molecular machines, we were able to develop body-friendly molecular machines.”
Every month, the Ministry of ICT and Science and the National Research Foundation of Korea award a cash prize worth 10,000,000 KRW to a scientist who has contributed to science and technology with outstanding research and development performance.
2018.03.15 View 7852 -
Seong-Tae Kim Wins Robert-Wagner All-Conference Best Paper Award
(Ph.D. candidate Seong-Tae Kim)
Ph.D. candidate Seong-Tae Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering won the Robert Wagner All-Conference Best Student Paper Award during the 2018 International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) Medical Imaging Conference, which was held in Houston last month.
Kim, supervised by Professor Yong Man Ro, received the award for his paper in the category of computer-aided diagnosis. His paper, titled “ICADx: Interpretable Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Breast Masses”, was selected as the best paper out of 900 submissions. The conference selects the best paper in nine different categories. His research provides new insights on diagnostic technology to detect breast cancer powered by deep learning.
2018.03.15 View 8657 -
Recognizing Seven Different Face Emotions on a Mobile Platform
(Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo)
A KAIST research team succeeded in achieving face emotion recognition on a mobile platform by developing an AI semiconductor IC that processes two neural networks on a single chip.
Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo and his team (Primary researcher: Jinmook Lee Ph. D. student) from the School of Electrical Engineering developed a unified deep neural network processing unit (UNPU).
Deep learning is a technology for machine learning based on artificial neural networks, which allows a computer to learn by itself, just like a human.
The developed chip adjusts the weight precision (from 1 bit to 16 bit) of a neural network inside of the semiconductor in order to optimize energy efficiency and accuracy. With a single chip, it can process a convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) simultaneously. CNN is used for categorizing and recognizing images while RNN is for action recognition and speech recognition, such as time-series information.
Moreover, it enables an adjustment in energy efficiency and accuracy dynamically while recognizing objects. To realize mobile AI technology, it needs to process high-speed operations with low energy, otherwise the battery can run out quickly due to processing massive amounts of information at once. According to the team, this chip has better operation performance compared to world-class level mobile AI chips such as Google TPU. The energy efficiency of the new chip is 4 times higher than the TPU.
In order to demonstrate its high performance, the team installed UNPU in a smartphone to facilitate automatic face emotion recognition on the smartphone. This system displays a user’s emotions in real time. The research results for this system were presented at the 2018 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on February 13.
Professor Yoo said, “We have developed a semiconductor that accelerates with low power requirements in order to realize AI on mobile platforms. We are hoping that this technology will be applied in various areas, such as object recognition, emotion recognition, action recognition, and automatic translation. Within one year, we will commercialize this technology.”
2018.03.09 View 6739 -
Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: Between Reality and Virtuality
A workshop on blockchain and cryptocurrency, one of the 4th Industrial Revolution Workshop Series, was held at the KAIST main campus on March 7.
Experts from industry, academia, and research gathered and shared their opinions about blockchain technology, which is currently gaining huge attention along with cryptocurrency.
During the workshop, four KAIST professors and four experts from institutes and business examined the scope on the possibility of blockchain, technology for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, they discussed a variety of issues including mining, wallets, cryptocurrency, information security, smart contracts, and ICOs.
In a previous blockchain tutorial, Professor Yongdae Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST and Professor Hyoungshick Kim from Sungkyunkwan University opened up a blockchain tutorial which provided a technical understanding of blockchain, such as the birth of cryptocurrency, algorithm design, and exchange methods.
Professor Jungho Kim, who is in charge of this event, said, “This workshop will broaden the understanding of blockchain, which can provide a foundation for a national growth engine.”
2018.03.07 View 6670 -
MoU Signed by the Republic of Korea Army and KAIST
(From left: KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin and ROKA Chief of Staff Youngwoo Kim)
On March 7, the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) and KAIST signed an MoU and opened special sessions dedicated to the army in order to reinforce research and development capacities.
The close partnership between KAIST and ROKA will provide an opportunity to establish advanced combat development systems.
Through the MoU, signed by KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin and ROKA Chief of Staff Youngwoo Kim, both organizations will discuss new opportunities for cooperation between academia and military and establish an institute and its curriculum.
KAIST is offering special sessions for the army March 5-9, where about 150 executives from ROKA, including the headquarters, education and training command, and logistics command, will participate.
These session are expected to enhance the army’s capabilities through education on cutting-edge equipment that will emerge during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The director of the KAIST Security Convergence Institute, Soo Hyun Kim, said, “KAIST and ROKA will plan and operate various programs together though this partnership as well as special sessions. I hope this cooperation will be an opportunity to enhance the combat development of ROKA.”
2018.03.07 View 5516 -
Activation of Bystander Immune Cells during Acute Hepatitis A.
A KAIST research team has identified a process of tissue damage caused by bystander immune cells in acute viral infections. This research will pave the way for research to understand the principles of tissue damage in viral infections and immune diseases, and can point toward a possible therapeutic target for the treatment.
Upon viral infection, viral replication itself destroys human cells, but in some cases, viral replication is not the direct cause of the tissue damage. In particular, the destruction of infected cells is the primary cause of tissue damage during non-cytopathic viral infections such as hepatitis A virus, hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus. However, the underlying pathological mechanisms involved in the tissue damage during viral infections have not been fully elucidated.
Specificity is one of the most important characteristics of the immune system. In general, infection from a certain virus specifically activates immune cells targeting the virus, while other immune cells specific to different viruses remain inactive.
An immune cell not specific to an infected virus is called a bystander immune cell. A phenomenon that activates irrelevant immune cells not originally targeting the infecting virus, called the activation of bystander immune cells, is already known to the world; however, its clinical significance has not been investigated thoroughly.
Professor Eui-Cheol Shin and Professor Su-Hyung Park from the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering analyzed patients with acute hepatitis A, in collaboration with Chung-Ang University Hospital.
The team found not only immune cells specifically targeting the hepatitis A virus were activated, but also bystander immune cells were activated and involved in the damaging of liver tissues during acute hepatitis A.
According to the research, when a person is infected with hepatitis A virus, hepatitis A virus-infected cells produce IL-15, which induces the activation of bystander immune cells. Activated bystander immune cells exert innate-like cytotoxicity, triggered by activating receptors NKG2D and NKp30 and this can lead to liver injury.
Through describing the cause of excessive tissue damage during acute viral hepatitis, the research outcome is expected to provide critical contributions for the development of potential therapeutic intervention that can minimize tissue damage caused by viral hepatitis and immune disorders.
Professor Shin said, “This is a novel research case that discovered the clinical significance of bystander immune cell activation, which was previously unknown. We will continue to work on establishing treatments which could prevent tissue damage in viral and immune diseases in the future.”
This research was published in Immunity on January 2.
Figure 1. Graphical abstract
2018.03.06 View 6337 -
The 22nd Humanistic Education Opens to Daejeon Citizens
The KAIST Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences will open up the 22nd Humanistic Education for Citizens every week from March 21 to April 25.
People can apply for this program through its website (http://hss.kaist.ac.kr), starting from March 12. Anyone living in Daejeon can participate in this program at no charge but the program is limited to 100 participants on a first-come, first-serve basis.
KAIST Humanistic Education for Citizens was established in 2012 and is held four times during a year to reinforce bonding with local citizens and enhance cultural refinement and an appreciation of literature.
With the topic ‘Are News Facts?” the seminar has invited six lecturers, including Researcher Soo Young Kim from the Institute of Communication Research, to navigate various issues that smart news users need to know in this era of massive news consumption.
The lecture is dedicated to discussing a current hot issue, the phenomenon of fake news, from various perspectives and to promote smart news consumption.
It will also help to provide an understanding of legal and policy changes regarding media production and distribution.
Professor Donghwan Ko, who is also the dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences said, “The lectures will provide information on various issues that people need to know more about for smart news consumption in the “infoglut” era from media, psychological, social, and legal perspectives.”
The lectures will be held every Wednesday at 3pm in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
2018.03.06 View 5001 -
KAIST Professors Selected as Y-KAST Members
Professor YongKeun Park, Professor Bumjoon Kim, Professor Keon Jae Lee, and Professor Young Seok Ju were selected as the newest members of the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology (Y-KAST).
The Korean Academy of Science and Technology, an academic institution of professional experts, selected 26 promising scientists under the age of 43 to join Y-KAST. and four KAIST professors were included in the list.
The newest members were conferred on February 26.
Research Field
Name
Natural Sciences
YongKeun Park (Dept. of Physics)
Engineering
Bumjoon Kim (Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
Agricultural & Fishery Sciences
Keon Jae Lee (Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering)
Medical Sciences
Young Seok Ju (Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering)
2018.03.05 View 7951