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KAIST to Open the Meditation Research Center
KAIST announced that it will open its Meditation Research Center next June. The center will serve as a place for the wellness of KAIST community as well as for furthering the cognitive sciences and its relevant convergence studies.
For facilitating the center, KAIST signed an MOU with the Foundation Academia Platonica in Seoul, an academy working for enriching the humanities and insight meditation on Aug.31. The Venerable Misan, a Buddhist monk well-known for his ‘Heart Smile Meditation’ program, will head the center.
The center will also conduct convergence research on meditation, which will translate into brain imaging, cognitive behavior, and its psychological effects. Built upon the research, the center expects to publish textbooks on meditation and will distribute them to the public and schools in an effort to widely disseminate the benefits of meditation.
As mindful meditation has become mainstream and more extensively studied, growing evidence suggests multiple psychological and physical benefits of these mindfulness exercises as well as for similar practices. Mind-body practices like meditation have been shown to reduce the body’s stress response by strengthening the relaxation response and lowering stress hormones.
The Venerable Misan, a Ph.D in philosophy from Oxford University, also serves as the director of the Sangdo Meditation Center and a professor at Joong-Ang Sangha University, a higher educational institution for Buddhist monks.
Monk Misan said that meditation will play a crucial part in educating creative students with an empathetic mindset. He added, “Hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley such as Google and Intel have long introduced meditation programs for stress management. Such practices will enhance the wellness of employees as well as their working efficiency.”
President Sung-Chul Shin said of the opening of the center, “From long ago, many universities in foreign countries including Havard, Stanford, Oxfor universities and the Max Planck Institute in Germany have applied scientific approaches to meditation and installed meditation centers. I am pleased to open our own center next year and I believe that it will bring more diverse opportunities for advancing convergent studies in AI and cognitive sciences.
2017.08.31 View 6765 -
Why Don't My Document Photos Rotate Correctly?
John, an insurance planner, took several photos of a competitors’ new brochures. At a meeting, he opened a photo gallery to discuss the documents with his colleagues. He found, however, that the photos of the document had the wrong orientation; they had been rotated in 90 degrees clockwise. He then rotated his phone 90 degrees counterclockwise, but the document photos also rotated at the same time. After trying this several times, he realized that it was impossible to display the document photos correctly on his phone. Instead, he had to set his phone down on a table and move his chair to show the photos in the correct orientation. It was very frustrating for John and his colleagues, because the document photos had different patterns of orientation errors.
Professor Uichin Lee and his team at KAIST have identified the key reasons for such orientation errors and proposed novel techniques to solve this problem efficiently. Interestingly, it was due to a software glitch in screen rotation–tracking algorithms, and all smartphones on the market suffer from this error.
When taking a photo of a document, your smartphone generally becomes parallel to the flat surface, as shown in the figure above (right). Professor Lee said, “Your phone fails to track the orientation if you make any rotation changes at that moment.” This is because software engineers designed the rotation tracking software in conventional smartphones with the following assumption: people hold their phones vertically either in portrait or landscape orientations. Orientation tracking can be done by simply measuring the gravity direction using an acceleration sensor in the phone (for example, whether gravity falls into the portrait or landscape direction).
Professor Lee’s team conducted a controlled experiment to discover how often orientation errors happen in document-capturing tasks. Surprisingly, their results showed that landscape document photos had error rates of 93%. Smartphones’ camera apps display the current orientation using a camera-shaped icon, but users are unaware of this feature, nor do they notice its state when they take document photos. This is why we often encounter rotation errors in our daily lives, with no idea of why the errors are occurring.
The team developed a technique that can correct a phone’s orientation by tracking the rotation sensor in a phone. When people take document photos their smartphones become parallel to the documents on a flat surface. This intention of photographing documents can be easily recognizable because gravity falls onto the phone’s surface. The current orientation can be tracked by monitoring the occurrence of significant rotation.
In addition, the research team discovered that when taking a document photo, the user tends to tilt the phone, just slightly, towards the user (called a “micro-tilt phenomenon”). While the tilting degree is very small—almost indistinguishable to the naked eye—these distinct behavioral cues are enough to train machine-learning models that can easily learn the patterns of gravity distributions across the phone.
The team’s experimental results showed that their algorithms can accurately track phone orientation in document-capturing tasks at 93% accuracy. Their approaches can be readily integrated into both Google Android and Apple iPhones. The key benefits of their proposals are that the correction software works only when the intent of photographing documents is detected, and that it can seamlessly work with existing orientation tracking methods without conflict. The research team even suggested a novel user interface for photographing documents. Just like with photocopiers, the capture interface overlays a document shape onto a viewfinder so that the user can easily double-check possible orientation errors.
Professor Lee said, “Photographing documents is part of our daily activities, but orientation errors are so prevalent that many users have difficulties in viewing their documents on their phones without even knowing why such errors happen.” He added, “We can easily detect users’ intentions to photograph a document and automatically correct orientation changes. Our techniques not only eliminate any inconvenience with orientation errors, but also enable a range of novel applications specifically designed for document capturing.” This work, supported by the Korean Government (MSIP), was published online in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in March 2017. In addition, their US patent application was granted in March 2017.
(Photo caption: The team of Professor Lee and his Ph.D.student Jeungmin Oh developed a technique that can correct a phone’s orientation by tracking the rotation sensor in a phone.)
2017.06.27 View 7655 -
Crowdsourcing-Based Global Indoor Positioning System
Research team of Professor Dong-Soo Han of the School of Computing Intelligent Service Lab at KAIST developed a system for providing global indoor localization using Wi-Fi signals. The technology uses numerous smartphones to collect fingerprints of location data and label them automatically, significantly reducing the cost of constructing an indoor localization system while maintaining high accuracy.
The method can be used in any building in the world, provided the floor plan is available and there are Wi-Fi fingerprints to collect. To accurately collect and label the location information of the Wi-Fi fingerprints, the research team analyzed indoor space utilization. This led to technology that classified indoor spaces into places used for stationary tasks (resting spaces) and spaces used to reach said places (transient spaces), and utilized separate algorithms to optimally and automatically collect location labelling data.
Years ago, the team implemented a way to automatically label resting space locations from signals collected in various contexts such as homes, shops, and offices via the users’ home or office address information. The latest method allows for the automatic labelling of transient space locations such as hallways, lobbies, and stairs using unsupervised learning, without any additional location information. Testing in KAIST’s N5 building and the 7th floor of N1 building manifested the technology is capable of accuracy up to three or four meters given enough training data. The accuracy level is comparable to technology using manually-labeled location information.
Google, Microsoft, and other multinational corporations collected tens of thousands of floor plans for their indoor localization projects. Indoor radio map construction was also attempted by the firms but proved more difficult. As a result, existing indoor localization services were often plagued by inaccuracies. In Korea, COEX, Lotte World Tower, and other landmarks provide comparatively accurate indoor localization, but most buildings suffer from the lack of radio maps, preventing indoor localization services.
Professor Han said, “This technology allows the easy deployment of highly accurate indoor localization systems in any building in the world. In the near future, most indoor spaces will be able to provide localization services, just like outdoor spaces.” He further added that smartphone-collected Wi-Fi fingerprints have been unutilized and often discarded, but now they should be treated as invaluable resources, which create a new big data field of Wi-Fi fingerprints. This new indoor navigation technology is likely to be valuable to Google, Apple, or other global firms providing indoor positioning services globally. The technology will also be valuable for helping domestic firms provide positioning services.
Professor Han added that “the new global indoor localization system deployment technology will be added to KAILOS, KAIST’s indoor localization system.” KAILOS was released in 2014 as KAIST’s open platform for indoor localization service, allowing anyone in the world to add floor plans to KAILOS, and collect the building’s Wi-Fi fingerprints for a universal indoor localization service. As localization accuracy improves in indoor environments, despite the absence of GPS signals, applications such as location-based SNS, location-based IoT, and location-based O2O are expected to take off, leading to various improvements in convenience and safety. Integrated indoor-outdoor navigation services are also visible on the horizon, fusing vehicular navigation technology with indoor navigation.
Professor Han’s research was published in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) in November in 2016.
For more, please visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7349230http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7805133/
2017.04.06 View 10267 -
Mystery of Biological Plastic Synthesis Machinery Unveiled
Plastics and other polymers are used every day. These polymers are mostly made from fossil resources by refining petrochemicals. On the other hand, many microorganisms naturally synthesize polyesters known as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) as distinct granules inside cells.
PHAs are a family of microbial polyesters that have attracted much attention as biodegradable and biocompatible plastics and elastomers that can substitute petrochemical counterparts. There have been numerous papers and patents on gene cloning and metabolic engineering of PHA biosynthetic machineries, biochemical studies, and production of PHAs; simple Google search with “polyhydroxyalkanoates” yielded returns of 223,000 document pages. PHAs have always been considered amazing examples of biological polymer synthesis. It is astounding to see PHAs of 500 kDa to sometimes as high as 10,000 kDa can be synthesized in vivo by PHA synthase, the key polymerizing enzyme in PHA biosynthesis. They have attracted great interest in determining the crystal structure of PHA synthase over the last 30 years, but unfortunately without success. Thus, the characteristics and molecular mechanisms of PHA synthase were under a dark veil.
In two papers published back-to-back in Biotechnology Journal online on November 30, 2016, a Korean research team led by Professor Kyung-Jin Kim at Kyungpook National University and Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) described the crystal structure of PHA synthase from Ralstonia eutropha, the best studied bacterium for PHA production, and reported the structural basis for the detailed molecular mechanisms of PHA biosynthesis. The crystal structure has been deposited to Protein Data Bank in February 2016. After deciphering the crystal structure of the catalytic domain of PHA synthase, in addition to other structural studies on whole enzyme and related proteins, the research team also performed experiments to elucidate the mechanisms of the enzyme reaction, validating detailed structures, enzyme engineering, and also N-terminal domain studies among others.
Through several biochemical studies based on crystal structure, the authors show that PHA synthase exists as a dimer and is divided into two distinct domains, the N-terminal domain (RePhaC1ND) and the C-terminal domain (RePhaC1CD). The RePhaC1CD catalyzes the polymerization reaction via a non-processive ping-pong mechanism using a Cys-His-Asp catalytic triad. The two catalytic sites of the RePhaC1CD dimer are positioned 33.4 Å apart, suggesting that the polymerization reaction occurs independently at each site. This study also presents the structure-based mechanisms for substrate specificities of various PHA synthases from different classes.
Professor Sang Yup Lee, who has worked on this topic for more than 20 years, said,
“The results and information presented in these two papers have long been awaited not only in the PHA community, but also metabolic engineering, bacteriology/microbiology, and in general biological sciences communities. The structural information on PHA synthase together with the recently deciphered reaction mechanisms will be valuable for understanding the detailed mechanisms of biosynthesizing this important energy/redox storage material, and also for the rational engineering of PHA synthases to produce designer bioplastics from various monomers more efficiently.”
Indeed, these two papers published in Biotechnology Journal finally reveal the 30-year mystery of machinery of biological polyester synthesis, and will serve as the essential compass in creating designer and more efficient bioplastic machineries.
References:
Jieun Kim, Yeo-Jin Kim, So Young Choi, Sang Yup Lee and Kyung-Jin Kim. “Crystal structure of Ralstonia eutropha polyhydroxyalkanoate synthase C-terminal domain and reaction mechanisms” Biotechnology Journal DOI: 10.1002/biot.201600648
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/biot.201600648/abstract
Yeo-Jin Kim, So Young Choi, Jieun Kim, Kyeong Sik Jin, Sang Yup Lee and Kyung-Jin Kim. “Structure and function of the N-terminal domain of Ralstonia eutropha polyhydroxyalkanoate synthase, and the proposed structure and mechanisms of the whole enzyme” Biotechnology Journal DOI: 10.1002/biot.201600649
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/biot.201600649/abstract
2016.12.02 View 10900 -
Dr. Demis Hassabis, the Developer of AlphaGo, Lectures at KAIST
AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind in London to play the traditional Chinese board game Go, had five matches against Se-Dol Lee, a professional Go player in Korea from March 8-15, 2016. AlphaGo won four out of the five games, a significant test result showcasing the advancement achieved in the field of general-purpose artificial intelligence (GAI), according to the company.
Dr. Demis Hassabis, the Chief Executive Officer of Google DeepMind, visited KAIST on March 11, 2016 and gave an hour-long talk to students and faculty. In the lecture, which was entitled “Artificial Intelligence and the Future,” he introduced an overview of GAI and some of its applications in Atari video games and Go.
He said that the ultimate goal of GAI was to become a useful tool to help society solve some of the biggest and most pressing problems facing humanity, from climate change to disease diagnosis.
2016.03.11 View 4973 -
K-Glass 3 Offers Users a Keyboard to Type Text
KAIST researchers upgraded their smart glasses with a low-power multicore processor to employ stereo vision and deep-learning algorithms, making the user interface and experience more intuitive and convenient.
K-Glass, smart glasses reinforced with augmented reality (AR) that were first developed by KAIST in 2014, with the second version released in 2015, is back with an even stronger model. The latest version, which KAIST researchers are calling K-Glass 3, allows users to text a message or type in key words for Internet surfing by offering a virtual keyboard for text and even one for a piano.
Currently, most wearable head-mounted displays (HMDs) suffer from a lack of rich user interfaces, short battery lives, and heavy weight. Some HMDs, such as Google Glass, use a touch panel and voice commands as an interface, but they are considered merely an extension of smartphones and are not optimized for wearable smart glasses. Recently, gaze recognition was proposed for HMDs including K-Glass 2, but gaze cannot be realized as a natural user interface (UI) and experience (UX) due to its limited interactivity and lengthy gaze-calibration time, which can be up to several minutes.
As a solution, Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo and his team from the Electrical Engineering Department recently developed K-Glass 3 with a low-power natural UI and UX processor. This processor is composed of a pre-processing core to implement stereo vision, seven deep-learning cores to accelerate real-time scene recognition within 33 milliseconds, and one rendering engine for the display.
The stereo-vision camera, located on the front of K-Glass 3, works in a manner similar to three dimension (3D) sensing in human vision. The camera’s two lenses, displayed horizontally from one another just like depth perception produced by left and right eyes, take pictures of the same objects or scenes and combine these two different images to extract spatial depth information, which is necessary to reconstruct 3D environments. The camera’s vision algorithm has an energy efficiency of 20 milliwatts on average, allowing it to operate in the Glass more than 24 hours without interruption.
The research team adopted deep-learning-multi core technology dedicated for mobile devices. This technology has greatly improved the Glass’s recognition accuracy with images and speech, while shortening the time needed to process and analyze data. In addition, the Glass’s multi-core processor is advanced enough to become idle when it detects no motion from users. Instead, it executes complex deep-learning algorithms with a minimal power to achieve high performance.
Professor Yoo said, “We have succeeded in fabricating a low-power multi-core processer that consumes only 126 milliwatts of power with a high efficiency rate. It is essential to develop a smaller, lighter, and low-power processor if we want to incorporate the widespread use of smart glasses and wearable devices into everyday life. K-Glass 3’s more intuitive UI and convenient UX permit users to enjoy enhanced AR experiences such as a keyboard or a better, more responsive mouse.”
Along with the research team, UX Factory, a Korean UI and UX developer, participated in the K-Glass 3 project.
These research results entitled “A 126.1mW Real-Time Natural UI/UX Processor with Embedded Deep-Learning Core for Low-Power Smart Glasses” (lead author: Seong-Wook Park, a doctoral student in the Electrical Engineering Department, KAIST) were presented at the 2016 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) that took place January 31-February 4, 2016 in San Francisco, California.
YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/If_anx5NerQ
Figure 1: K-Glass 3
K-Glass 3 is equipped with a stereo camera, dual microphones, a WiFi module, and eight batteries to offer higher recognition accuracy and enhanced augmented reality experiences than previous models.
Figure 2: Architecture of the Low-Power Multi-Core Processor
K-Glass 3’s processor is designed to include several cores for pre-processing, deep-learning, and graphic rendering.
Figure 3: Virtual Text and Piano Keyboard
K-Glass 3 can detect hands and recognize their movements to provide users with such augmented reality applications as a virtual text or piano keyboard.
2016.02.26 View 13805 -
An App to Digitally Detox from Smartphone Addiction: Lock n' LOL
KAIST researchers have developed an application that helps people restrain themselves from using smartphones during meetings or social gatherings.
The app’s group limit mode enforces users to curtail their smartphone usage through peer-pressure while offering flexibility to use the phone in an emergency.
When a fake phone company released its line of products, NoPhones, a thin, rectangular-shaped plastic block that looked just like a smartphone but did not function, many doubted that the simulated smartphones would find any users. Surprisingly, close to 4,000 fake phones were sold to consumers who wanted to curb their phone usage.
As smartphones penetrate every facet of our daily lives, a growing number of people have expressed concern about distractions or even the addictions they suffer from overusing smartphones.
Professor Uichin Lee of the Department of Knowledge Service Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and his research team have recently introduced a solution to this problem by developing an application, Lock n’ LoL (Lock Your Smartphone and Laugh Out Loud), to help people lock their smartphones altogether and keep them from using the phone while engaged in social activities such as meetings, conferences, and discussions.
Researchers note that the overuse of smartphones often results from users’ habitual checking of messages, emails, or other online contents such as status updates in social networking service (SNS). External stimuli, for example, notification alarms, add to smartphone distractions and interruptions in group interactions.
The Lock n’ LoL allows users to create a new room or join an existing room. The users then invite meeting participants or friends to the room and share its ID with them to enact the Group Limit (lock) mode. When phones are in the lock mode, all alarms and notifications are automatically muted, and users must ask permission to unlock their phones. However, in an emergency, users can access their phones for accumulative five minutes in a temporary unlimit mode.
In addition, the app’s Co-location Reminder detects and lists nearby users to encourage app users to limit their phone use. The Lock n’ LoL also displays important statistics to monitor users’ behavior such as the current week’s total limit time, the weekly average usage time, top friends ranked by time spent together, and top activities in which the users participated.
Professor Lee said,
“We conducted the Lock n’ LoL campaign throughout the campus for one month this year with 1,000 students participating. As a result, we discovered that students accumulated more than 10,000 free hours from using the app on their smartphones. The students said that they were able to focus more on their group activities. In an age of the Internet of Things, we expect that the adverse effects of mobile distractions and addictions will emerge as a social concern, and our Lock n’ LoL is a key effort to address this issue.”
He added, “This app will certainly help family members to interact more with each other during the holiday season.”
The Lock n’ LoL is available for free download on the App Store and Google Play: https://itunes.apple.com/lc/app/lock-n-lol/id1030287673?mt=8.
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/1wY2pI9qFYM
Figure 1: User Interfaces of Lock n’ LoL
This shows the final design of Lock n’ LoL, which consists of three tabs: My Info, Friends, and Group Limit Mode. Users can activate the limit mode by clicking the start button at the bottom of the screen.
Figure 2: Statistics of Field Deployment
This shows the deployment summary of Lock n’ LoL campaign in May 2015.
2015.12.17 View 10683 -
KAIST's Doctoral Candidate Receives the 2015 Google Ph.D. Fellowship
Shin-Ae Woo, a doctoral student of Professor Su-Bok Moon of KAIST’s School of Computer Engineering, has received the 2015 Google Ph.D. Fellowship.
The fellowship’s term lasts one year, starting September 2015.
The fellowship awarded Ms. Woo with USD 10,000 of cash prize, an opportunity to meet a Google research mentor, and a summer internship at the company.
Created in 2009, the Google Ph.D. Fellowship annually recognizes outstanding doctoral students around the world in computer science and its related fields.
This year, a total of 44 doctoral students including Ms. Woo, who is studying networking and distributed system, have been nominated.
She has also received the NSDI (Networked Systems Design and Implementation) 2015 Community Award and the 2014 Samsung Human Technology Journal Silver Prize for her research work on “Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable User-level TCP Stack for Multicore Systems” and “Comparison of Caching Strategies in Modern Cellular Backhaul Networks.”
Currently, Ms. Woo is working with UC Berkeley faculty on next-generation data centers for a research exchange program.
2015.09.15 View 7371 -
KAIST to Hold a Colloquium on the Internet of Things and Open Stack
With the support of the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning of Korea, KAIST hosted a colloquium on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Open Stack at the KAIST Research Center for Global Cooperation located in Pangyo. The upcoming event was organized to provide an overview of the technological trends to IT companies and foster their success in the global market.
The colloquium invited numerous field-experts as speakers and discussed the influence of IoT and OpenStack on the small- and medium-sized companies in Korea.
Professor Gwan-Hoo Lee from the American University joined as a speaker and shared his insights of how IoT would change the global business environment. He introduced various business models developed by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, and Cisco and discussed how Korean companies could utilize the existing tools and strategy to succeed in the global market. His talk focused specifically on the importance of overseas partnerships and technology stack analysis.
President Hyun-Jung Jang from the Korean OpenStack Community also gave a speech on global partnership through OpenStack. He discussed the future trends of OpenStack and why companies should invest in the field.
KAIST used the event as an opportunity to provide information to domestic companies that are interested in building partnerships with overseas companies and in developing new IoT and OpenStack technology.
More information about the event can be provided online at www.ictc.or.kr.
2015.09.11 View 5801 -
Dong-Young Lee, a Doctoral Candidate, Receives the Best Paper Award
Dong-Young Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST, received the Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Composite Structures (ICCS). The event was held in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 15-18, 2015. Mr. Lee’s adviser is Professor Dai-Gil Lee of the same department.
The ICCS is held every other year, and is one of the largest and long-established conferences on composite materials and structures in the world. At this year’s conference, a total of 680 papers were presented, among which, two papers were chosen for the Best Paper Award, including Mr. Lee’s.
The paper, entitled “Gasket-integrated Carbon and Silicon Elastomer Composite Bipolar Plate for High-temperature PEMFC,” will be published in the September issue of Composite Structures which is one of the top journals in mechanical engineering as judged by the Google Scholar Metrics rankings.
Mr. Lee dropped the conventional method of PEMFC (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells) assembly and instead developed a gasket-integrated carbon and silicone elastomer composite bipolar plate. This technology significantly increased the energy efficiency of fuel cells and their productivity.
Mr. Lee said, “I would like to thank the many people who supported me, especially my Ph.D. adviser, Professor Dai-Gil Lee. Without their encouragement, I would have not won this award. I hope my research will contribute to solving energy problems in the future.”
In addition, Professor Joon-Woo Im from Chonbuk National University, Senior Researcher Il-Bum Choi from the Agency for Defense Development, and a fellow doctoral candidate Soo-Hyun Nam from KAIST participated in this research project.
2015.07.09 View 10649 -
Professor Jinwoo Shin Receives the Bloomberg Scientific Research Award
Professor Jinwoo Shin (https://sites.google.com/site/mijirim/) of the Electrical Engineering Department at KAIST has been selected as one of the three winners to receive the first Bloomberg Scientific Research Award this month. The newly created award is presented to researchers in computer science who conduct high-quality research in such areas as machine learning, natural language processing, machine translation, statistics, and theory.
Professor Shin submitted his research proposal entitled “Scalable Probabilistic Deep Leaning,” and the award will support funding his research for one year. For details, please click on the link below for an article released by Bloomberg News, announcing the winners of the award:
Bloomberg News, April 28, 2015
“Announcing the Winners of the Bloomberg’s First Scientific Research Program”
https://3blmedia.com/News/Announcing-Winners-Bloombergs-First-Scientific-Research-Program
2015.04.30 View 8834 -
"Software Welcomes Girls" Camp at KAIST
KAIST’s Department of Computer Science organized a software (SW) training camp from January 25-29, 2015 in the Creative Learning Building on campus to promote talented women for the field of information technology (IT).
Hosted by the National Information Society Agency in Korea and the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity, the training camp was comprised of a junior program to educate primary and secondary school students along with teachers and parents, while university students, software developers, and female professionals who had interrupted their careers participated in a senior camp.
In the junior camp, participants learned how to employ Scratch and App Inventor as well as microprocessors by using Arduino and Raspberry Pi. During the camp, students including those from multicultural families attended lectures from professors and software designers and received a career consulting session from them. The conference organizers will provide long-term mentoring for the primary and secondary school students by graduate student participants and other volunteer experts.
The senior camp consisted of a program entitled “More Women, Better SW!” and a special lecture on “Women in SOS (Software Optimization Services)” took place at Google Korea. University students, teachers, and SW developers had an opportunity to design applications intended to improve daily living. At the “Women in SOS” program, Professor Alice Oh of KAIST and other industry experts gave talks about successful women IT personnel and digital literacy.
One of the organizers, Professor Yoon-Joon Lee from the Computer Science Department said, “Software-centered societies in the future will demand delicate intuition and cooperative leadership, which are characteristics of women.” He added that “I hope more women become interested in this field through this event.”
2015.02.02 View 8290