Department of Knowledge Service Engineering

URL : http://kse.kaist.ac.kr

Introduction

The department of Knowledge Service Engineering, the first such department in the world, was established in 2008 as one of the graduate programs at KAIST. The new department reflects KAIST’s strong vision for the IT ecology and knowledge society of the 21st century and its resolution to take initiative in this very important emerging area.

The 21st century civilization has moved into the knowledge society, where prosperity of an individual or a nation depends on acquisition and utilization of knowledge and human knowledge-intensive tasks produce the highest value. The tasks, centered on decision-making, become increasingly more critical and valuable components throughout our economy activities, ranging from the conventional manufacturing and transportation systems to the financial, educational, service, government and social systems.

Human decision making is an essential part of daily function, but the help is coming from computers and information networks. The huge amount of knowledge is dispersed over the information network and becomes readily accessible and affordable with the help of the internet. However, human decision makers seldom fully utilize it as effective knowledge, suffering from information overload due to their own cognitive limitations, ill-tuned communication and ill-designed cooperation between humans and machines. It is a tall mission to solve this bottleneck that requires both profound academic understanding and innovative ideas. The department takes this mission to realize high-performance joint cognitive systems that comprise both human and the information network.

Education and Research Areas

To enhance human decision making with computer aids and information, interdisciplinary research based on two pillars is called for: cognitive engineering from humans and intelligent knowledge processing from computers. In the human-cognitive pillar, one needs to understand cognitive science and human decision characteristics, while knowledge modeling and processing, data mining, and AI technologies have to be mastered in the computing intelligence pillar. These diverse basic disciplines are integrated through Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design and system engineering principles. Thus, the education and research of the department can be categorized into five fields: 1) Cognition Science and Decision Making, 2) Intelligent Computing, 3) Human-System interaction, 4) Knowledge-based Systems Engineering, and 5) Paradigms of Knowledge Service Systems.

Application Areas

OECD defines Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) as "services which rely heavily upon professional knowledge, and either supply products which are themselves primarily sources of information and knowledge to their users, or use their knowledge to produce services which are intermediate inputs to their clients’ own knowledge generating and information processing activities, having other businesses as their main clients." One may well take this as defining the application areas of the department. The Korean Government also defined Knowledge Service Industry analogously and included it among the seven new growth power industries. It embraces financial services, marketing and advertising, education and training, health care services, consultancy services, technical engineering service, smart logistic services, as well as IT and contents services. However, in addition to these service areas, other disciplines requiring accumulation and utilization of knowledge can be research areas of the department and target areas for our graduates.

Current Status

The department currently offers master and doctoral programs and its official language is English. As of November 2009, the department has six full-time faculty members and continues to expand its faculty. Most of the faculty members, internationally recruited, are non-Koreans.