ES
-
Welcoming the Class of 2014
“The four years from today will go quickly, and I urge you to make the most of your time in KAIST, a great educational and research institution where you will explore the frontiers of science and technology and take part in the creation of new knowledge,” President Kang told the freshmen at the convocation ceremony.
Freshmen Convocation for the Class of 2014 took place on March 3, 2014 at the auditorium on the main campus. Members of the KAIST community, along with hundreds of parents and guests, welcomed the incoming 800 freshmen, celebrating the beginning of their four-year college life.
Kwang-Joon Ahn, a graduate of the Korea Science Academy, and Ha-Rim Jin, a graduate of Daegu Il Science High School, were representatives of the incoming students, and they took the “Class of 2014 Pledge,” a commitment to uphold KAIST’s core values, which is "creativity and challenge (endeavoring spirit)," and to pursue intellectual passion and discovery.
President Steve Kang delivered congratulatory remarks, encouraging students to use their opportunities to the fullest while at KAIST to broaden their knowledge and experience. He also stressed the following four important principles they should cultivate to become the leaders of tomorrow: be grateful, excel in their field, keep open minds about what the globalized world would bring, and never give up on their dreams and belief.
President Kang said:
“Probably, many of you, the graduates of the best high schools in Korea, will find KAIST a tougher place to be in than you imagined. But challenges, particularly intellectual challenges, should be viewed as an opportunity to grow. It is ok to fail. In fact, without risking failures, there won’t be a meaningful growth because the real growth comes from overcoming challenges.”
“You can’t avoid failing in the course of your college life, but your perseverance to do it over will allow you to develop the skills and passion needed to become a leader who will contribute to the local community, as well as to the betterment of humanity.”
The KAIST Alumni Scholarship Foundation presented a scholarship of USD 3,700 to 24 freshmen.
The convocation ended with music performances by members of the student clubs at KAIST.
2014.03.04 View 8606 -
Seung-Han Lee, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, receives the best paper award from ISQED 2014
Seung-Han
Lee, a doctoral candidate in the department of electrical engineering at KAIST,
received a Best Paper Award from the International Symposium on Quality
Electronic Design (ISQED), a high-profile international conference started in 2000 to promote innovation and quality in electronic and
engineering designs through inter- and multidisciplinary approaches. The
award ceremony will take place at the 2014 ISQED on March 3-5, 2014 at the Convention
Center in Santa Clara, CA, USA.
Professor
Chong-Min Kyung, an advisor to Seung-Han, expressed his excitement about his student's achievement.
“This is
the first time a Korean has ever received the best paper award at this academic
conference. It’s great news to our student as well as to KAIST.”
The topic
of Lee’s research paper was dynamic cache data management for minimizing the
energy consumption of three-dimensional multi-processor semiconductor chips.
2014.03.03 View 10810 -
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject 2014
The QS
World University Rankings are annual university rankings published by
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) which provides the overall rankings of top global
universities as well as the rankings for individual subjects. The 2014 QS World
University Rankings by Subject is a comprehensive guide to the world’s best universities
in 30 popular subjects of 5 academic disciplines: arts & humanities,
engineering & technology, life sciences & medicine, natural sciences,
and social sciences.
According
to the 2014 subject rankings, released on February 26, KAIST made the list of top
50 universities in 9 subjects: physics & astronomy; materials sciences;
chemistry; chemical engineering; mechanical, aeronautical & manufacturing
engineering; electrical & electronic engineering; civil & structural engineering;
computer science & information systems; and biological sciences.
Among
them, KAIST was ranked number one in Korea for 5 subjects: materials sciences
(16th); mechanical, aeronautical & manufacturing engineering (21st);
civil & structural engineering (32nd); computer science &
information systems (36th), and biological sciences (43rd).
For basic sciences, KAIST has made good progress as well. For example, in
mathematics, KAIST took first place in Korea and was ranked in the 51st-100th
of the world’s top universities. Another notable result was that its business college
in Seoul campus, a relatively new addition to KAIST, made the rankings list of
51st-100th in accounting & finance.
The 2014
QS subject rankings used the following criteria for its evaluation of
university performance: a survey of academic and employer reputation, citations
per paper, inclusion of specialists, and the h-index, known as the Hirsch index or Hirsch number, which was
suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California in
San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists’ relative quality.
Today, the h-index is used to measure
both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or
scholar.
2014.02.28 View 11257 -
Festival Featuring Asia's Best Science Students to be Held
The first Electronic Olympics, which will host students from five top Asian research-centered universities, will be held in August at KAIST. Students will take part in competitive events and explore cultural diversity. Student representatives of HKUST, NTU, TITECH, Tsinghua University, and KAIST gathered on February 20 to begin planning the tentatively named “ASPIRE E-Olympics.”
The key words of this Olympics are "Harmony" and "Competition." The events will be composed of an AI programming contest, SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) picture contest, and the other technology-based contests. Cultural events, where each university’s students can interact, will also be prepared.
ASPIRE (Asian Science and Technology Pioneering Institutes of Research and Education) events have been held from 2009. Previously, the ASPIRE forum has been an exchange event for groups of vice presidents and graduate school students from the five schools to exchange achievements in education and research. This year, it has been extended to undergraduates.
Yoseop Kim, KAIST’s student body vice president, said that he wants to make a MOU with some of Asia’s best research-centered universities and develop it into something similar to the Davos Forum. His intention is to support the E-Olympics in the hope that ASPIRE will become a top university consortium.
From left, HKUST, KAIST, NTU, TITECH, Tsinghua University Logos
Student representative group photo of Top Asian Research-Centered Universities
Electronic Olympics for students from five top Asian science and engineering universities to be held in August
2014.02.27 View 8837 -
A game enthusiast received a Ph.D. at the 2014 commencement
A high school student, who was addicted to video gaming and had barely managed to gain entrance to KAIST, became a star of its 2014 commencement ceremony.
The student was Tae-Woo Park who received his Ph.D. in games at 32 years of age.
Park entered KAIST in 2002 as an undergraduate student. However, owning to bad grades, he was not accepted to the graduate school of KAIST until 2006. He began playing games at the age of 7, which distracted him from his studies at an early age. Nevertheless, he was able to complete master’s degree after two and a half years, which normally takes two years for average students.
Professor Joon-Hwa Song saw a possibility from his student’s experience of producing and commercializing a mobile puzzle game while Park was working as a president of the game club, HAJE, at KAIST. Professor Song advised him to take the advantage of his interests and try developing game platforms and contents. Park decided to develop a game that could help others and would change people’s negative views of games. He created a whole new generation of games.
In order to find ideas for games that can be easily enjoyed in daily lives, Park went to numerous gyms, swimming pools, daycare centers, and parks to analyze people’s behaviors and discussed with his colleagues who were also interested in games. During this process, the experience of organizing creative ideas through cooperation and discussions became a great foundation for his future research.
He observed some people quitting midway during a workout on treadmills because they were bored with working out alone. From this, Park embarked on developing a new style of game that allowed people to exercise together.
Park used the system on a treadmill, which recognizes the speed of the person running to automatically adjust the machine’s speed, to develop an interactive game platform for Swan Boat. The Swan Boat game is a race exercise game that adjusts the direction according to speed difference between two players. The game utilizes the difference of running speed between two people on treadmills to change the direction of the boat.
With the Swan Boat game, people can now play games and exercise at the same time. The technology also allows online access anywhere in the world, which means checking friends’ rankings at nearby gyms or homes, or even a World Gym Running Contest.
In addition, Park helped develop various next generation exercise games and life-based services, including the sparrow chirp application, which finds children that go astray, or an avatar game that utilizes the user’s daily life patterns. These results and papers attracted attention from international societies and have also won a number of awards.
Professor Song said, “There has been no precedent of receiving a Ph.D. at KAIST for developing games, however, Park’s case has given courage to many people that if you can create what is really required in everyday life, you can indeed receive a doctor’s degree.”
Park remarked, “I’d like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Professor Song, for giving me courage. I want to continue to make games that can help people’s lives in the future.”
Park will continue his work at the NASA Ames Research Center this June.
2014.02.27 View 10891 -
KAIST President Held One-year Anniversary Press Conference
President Steve Kang had a press conference
on February 25, 2014 at the Faculty Club on campus, commemorating the first
year of his presidency. About 30 different media representatives nationwide
attended the meeting.
At his first press conference on the anniversary of his tenure, President Kang
described what he has achieved in the past year, which were: 1) rebuilding the
campus culture to start a campaign for mutual respect, trust, and open
communication by holding meetings with the members of the KAIST community more
than 60 times, 2) establishing core values, creativity and challenge, to
enhance the fabric of the community, 3) restructuring of the university
administration, and 4) the announcement of the mid- and long-term development
plan.
He also mentioned that “2014 will be another exciting year for KAIST to make
more progress” and laid out a few major projects to be implemented this year:
launching of the “Committee for Engineering Education Innovation,” “Startup
KAIST” (an entrepreneurship program), “Greater Collaboration in Technology
Translation and Management with Seoul National University,” and “KAIST End Run”
(a global business incubation program).Explanation of 2014 Major Endeavors by President KangFor
the past decade, domestic engineering schools weighed SCI dissertation
publication more heavily in university evaluations, yielding a world-class
research level. However, such an approach resulted in placing less importance
on entrepreneurship, commercialization, or creating economic values.As a
result, engineering Professors have been evaluated as being too focused on theoretical
SCI dissertation research rather than practical research that could yield
economic benefits through commercialization of developed technology. In
addition, some have criticized that engineering universities have not educated
creative researchers demanded by the industry.KAIST
has begun responding to these criticisms and has made a few suggestions to strengthen
engineering education, promote entrepreneurship in engineers, and globalize Korean
venture companies.As
part of such efforts, KAIST established the KAIST Education and Research
Innovation Committee, composed of various individuals from the industry,
research institutes, alumni, faculty members, and others, to discuss ways to reinforce
engineering education.
A
course to encourage entrepreneurship will be implemented.Startup
KAIST will develop and commercialize innovative ideas from members of KAIST, and
the End Run project will enable students and faculty to establish a global,
venture company. KAIST hopes that a new entrepreneurial culture will be created
on campus, thereby the research success of KAIST members will lead to commercialization
and startups.KAIST
plans on releasing free internet lectures as part of its knowledge contribution
and sponsoring programs which will level the playing field in eduation.KAIST
will establish the KAIST Open Online Course (KOOC). An entrepreneurship
curriculum will be developed for KOOC. KAIST will start trials for KOOC from
2015, gradually expanding to include more courses.
2014.02.27 View 9620 -
Professor Yong-Tak Im of Mechanical Engineering Appointed as President of Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials
Yong-Tak Im, Professor of the Department of
Mechanical Engineering at KAIST, was sworn in on February 25, 2014 as
the 16th president of the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials
(KIMM), a leading government-funded research institution in Korea. KIMM was
established in 1976 to contribute to the development of
Korea through the invention of source technology and technology transfer in
mechanical engineering.
President Im graduated from Seoul National
University, obtaining degrees of Bachelor of Science and Master’s in mechanical
engineering. He later studied at the University of California in Berkeley and
received a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering.
After working as an assistant professor of
the Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University,
President Im joined KAIST as a professor of mechanical engineering in 1989.
President Im took many important posts at
KAIST, including Dean of Planning Office, Dean of External Affairs and Public
Relations Office, and Associate Vice President of Special Projects and
Institutional Relations, making a great addition to the university’s endeavors for
globalization.
Among the awards President Im received was the
William Johnson Award in 2007 presented by the Advances in Materials and
Processing Technologies, the Research Achievement Award in 2010 by the Global
Congress on Manufacturing and Management, and the Presidential Award in 2012 by
the Republic of Korea. He was also elected as the vice president of the Korean
Society of Mechanical Engineers, the largest association of professionals in
the mechanical engineering field in Korea.
President Im is currently a professor at
POSCO, an internationally known Korean steel company, and a member of the
Korean Academy of Science and Technology and the National Academy of
Engineering of Korea, respectively.
President Im will serve KIMM for three
years until February 24, 2017.
2014.02.25 View 11190 -
Phys.org: Researchers develop non-iridescent, structural, full-spectrum pigments for reflective displays
The latest research work by Professor Shin-Hyun Kim of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST on the “microcapsulation og photonic crystals using osmotic pressure” has been published by Phys.org, a leading web-based science, research and technology news. For the articles, please click the link below:February 20, 2014Researchers develop non-iridescent, structural, full-spectrum pigments for reflective displayshttp://phys.org/news/2014-02-non-iridescent-full-spectrum-pigments.html
2014.02.21 View 8503 -
Venture Startup by Middle School Students Makes Donation to KAIST
Korean middle school students who
participated in a venture program made donations to KAIST. “Mending”, a startup founded by Korean
middle school students, donated 10 million won and the education supplier “Edubox”
contributed 100 million won to the IP Education Center for Young Venture Candidates
at KAIST. The donations were made at the IP
Education Center’s 3rd graduation ceremony on February 14th
at KAIST. Mending was started by three students in
the IP Education Center in 2013. This startup
features volunteering through talent sharing and other educational endeavors. It
received voluntary donations from supporters of the programs. Hee-Yon Yon, the co-president of
Mending, said, “We have developed a new concept of business and showed profit
can be made through donations and sharing”. Edubox responded to the visions of
Mending and added to the donation for additional development of the IP
Education Center. The KAIST IP Education Center for
Young Venture Candidates was founded with the support of KIPO (Korean
Intellectual Property Office) and KIPA (Korea Invention Promotion Association)
in 2009. The curriculum consists of Intellectual Property, Entrepreneurship, Future
Technology and Humanities. Eighty students are selected for the program every
year and 200 students have successfully completed the program.
2014.02.18 View 7686 -
World's Largest Web Conference To Be Held in Korea
The 2014 International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2014), the world’s most prestigious academic conference in the field of web, will be held for the first time in Korea. The conference is to be last for five days at Seoul COEX, from 7th to 11th April. International World Wide Web Conference covers a wide range of web-related areas, including technologies, research papers, services and more. Since the first conference in 1994 in Switzerland, it has been held in various parts of North America, Europe, South America and Asia, attracting more than 1000 experts in the field. The 23rd International World Wide Web Conference is managed by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2) and co-hosted by KAIST and National Agency for Technology and Standards, as well as sponsored by Korea Information Science Society and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Keynote speakers for this year’s conference include inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, senior vice president of Microsoft, Dr. Qi Lu, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Prof. Christos Faloutsos, as well as Samsung Electronic’s vice president Jong-Deok Choi. In addition to WWW 2014, BigData Innovators Gathering (BIG 2014) and Web for Access (W4A 2014) is also to be held in joint. KAIST Computer Sciences Department’s Prof. Jinwan Jeong, in charge of directing this year’s conference, said “From one-sided 1st generation web to two-way 2nd generation web, such as blogs, and then recently to the 3rd generation web, which include social networks and semantic webs, the web technologies has grown vastly over the past 25 years. WWW 2014 will be the opportunity for Korea to discuss with the world about the informatization and future of the web.” Pre-registration for WWW 2014 can be applied at the official webpage for WWW 2014 (http://www2014.kr) before 17th February.
2014.02.14 View 10863 -
A Molecular Switch Controlling Self-Assembly of Protein Nanotubes Discovered
International collaborative research among South Korea, United States, and Israel research institutionsThe key to the treatment of cancer and brain disease mechanism The molecular switch that controls the self-assembly structure of the protein nanotubes, which plays crucial role in cell division and intracellular transport of materials, has been discovered. KAIST Bio and Brain Engineering Department’s Professor Myeong-Cheol Choi and Professor Chae-Yeon Song conducted the research, in collaboration with the University of California in Santa Barbara, U.S., and Hebrew University in Israel. The findings of the research were published in Nature Materials on the 19th. Microtubules are tube shaped and composed of protein that plays a key role in cell division, cytoskeleton, and intercellular material transport and is only 25nm in diameter (1/100,000 thickness of a human hair). Conventionally, cancer treatment focused on disrupting the formation of microtubules to suppress the division of cancer cells. In addition Alzheimer’s is known to be caused by the diminishing of structural integrity of microtubules responsible for intercellular material transport which leads to failure in signal transfer. The research team utilized synchrotron x-ray scattering and transmission electron microscope to analyze the self assemble structure of protein nanotubes to subnanometer accuracy. As a result, the microtubules were found to assemble into 25nm thickness tubules by stacking protein blocks 4 x 5 x 8nm in dimension. In the process, the research team discovered the molecular switch that controls the shape of these protein blocks. In addition the research team was successful in creating a new protein tube structure. Professor Choi commented that they were successful in introducing a new paradigm that suggests the possibility of controlling the complex biological functions of human’s biological system with the simple use of physical principles. He commented further that it is anticipated that the findings will allow for the application of bio nanotubes in engineering and that this is a small step in finding the mechanism behind cancer treatment and neural diseases.
2014.02.03 View 10821 -
KAIST-Saudi Nuclear Workforce Training
Nuclear Engineering Intensive Course Program Held in Saudi Arabia from January 5th to 23rd
KUSTAR (The Khalifa University of Science and Technology Studies)-KAIST Institute of Education began its Nuclear Engineering Intensive Course Program on 5th January with researchers from K.A.CARE (King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy) of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
This program, which was lasted until 23rd January, provided education to students on the basic technologies in the field of nuclear power.
The course involves a wide range of lectures, such as basic nuclear physics, applications using radiation, nuclear reactor design and safety, as well as nuclear power engineering.
In order to utilize the nuclear power and renewable energy, K.A.CARE was established in April 2010. The institution is also involved in the construction of nuclear infrastructure, including the site investigations, the establishment of regulatory bodies and state-owned nuclear companies, along with the newly launched workforce-training program.
The Director of the KUSTAR-KAIST Education Research Institute, Professor Soong-Heung Jang said, “This program is the beginning of long-term cooperation with Saudi Arabia. Our experience can be the basis for the construction of an extensive training program that involves many areas of nuclear engineering field.”
KAIST has been working in close cooperation with various institutions around the world, which also includes the establishment of KUSTAR-KAIST Institute of Education and Research in July 2010. KAIST is also actively cooperating with UAE Khalifa University in Middle East, sharing faculty, holding joint research programs and exchanging students.
2014.02.03 View 11244