Tag: Sogang University

Sogang University’s Semiconductor Specialization Program (ELITE) has introduced a new undergraduate course — “Semiconductor Device Fabrication” — offered jointly through the Departments of Electronic Engineering and System Semiconductor Engineering. The course moves well beyond process observation or equipment familiarization: each student individually designs, fabricates, and measures a silicon-based MOSFET device through a full CMOS process sequence carried out in a cleanroom.

The course enrolled 46 fourth-year undergraduates across 11 sections, supported by 6 faculty members and 11 teaching assistants. Of the participants, 40 are enrolled in the program’s Next-Generation Semiconductor major track or affiliated interdisciplinary track, making the course a direct extension of the ELITE curriculum’s broader goal of producing industry-ready semiconductor engineers.

Students progressed through the major unit processes of semiconductor manufacturing in sequence: photolithography, wafer cleaning, thermal oxidation, diffusion, thin-film deposition, and metal electrode formation. Following fabrication, they measured I-V and C-V characteristics of their completed devices and analyzed device parameters — building quantitative understanding of how process variables translate into electrical behavior.

The course was designed to develop three capabilities that conventional lecture-based instruction cannot easily provide: the ability to reason about the gap between design intent and actual process outcomes; a manufacturing-aware design perspective that accounts for process variability; and an individual device portfolio that students can present in industry recruitment contexts.

One participant, a fourth-year Electronic Engineering student, described the course as the most significant asset in her job search preparation, noting that her experience troubleshooting a process recipe gave her concrete, differentiated material to discuss in a recruitment interview at a major semiconductor company.

Professor Jinwook Burm, Director of the Semiconductor Specialization Program, stated that the course is intended to move students beyond process exposure toward genuine competency in semiconductor design, fabrication, and analysis — and that the program will continue expanding field-based educational opportunities as part of its commitment to developing the next generation of industry-ready engineers.

The ELITE program operates from March 2024 through February 2028 with support from the Ministry of Education and the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT), with a mandate to build practical semiconductor education infrastructure — including cleanroom facilities, design laboratories, industry-linked coursework, and global seminars — for Sogang undergraduates.

On July 24 and 25, Sogang University hosted the 2026 AI Big Data Festival, bringing together 22 students and 3 teachers from Bokja Girls’ High School alongside 6 members of Professor Jon-Lark Kim’s research team from the Department of Mathematics. The event marked the seventh consecutive year of educational exchange between the two institutions — and the most ambitious iteration yet, shifting from lectures and demonstrations to a hands-on mini-hackathon format in which students designed and built their own AI services.

The evolution reflects a deliberate progression. In 2024, the program covered natural language processing and data normalization through structured lectures. In 2025, sessions expanded to include the history of AI, mathematical foundations, an AI agent called Sogangbot, and applications of genetic algorithms and coding theory. This year, that accumulated knowledge became the basis for student-led creation.

Professor Jon-Lark Kim opened the event with a lecture on the development of AI and the mathematical principles underlying machine learning and deep learning, pitched at a level accessible to high school students. He was followed by members of his research team, who led hands-on sessions on AI agents, the n8n workflow automation platform, Word2Vec and natural language processing, and coding theory. Graduate student mentors provided close guidance throughout, helping each team move from idea to working prototype.

Students learned to use n8n to connect multiple programs and AI services into a single automated workflow — then applied that skill to problems they identified from their own school lives. Completed projects included an agent that checks the school academic calendar and sends updates via KakaoTalk, a school regulations information service, and a tool that summarizes the scripts from the school’s daily “Meditation Moment” morning broadcast and extracts meaningful passages.

The exercise illustrated something beyond technical skill: that AI can function not merely as a question-and-answer tool but as a practical agent that connects information and services in response to real needs. Students continued working on their projects after returning to their accommodation, with one supervising teacher noting that the unfinished work would itself become a starting point for further exploration.

Student responses reflected both the technical engagement and the broader impression the program left. Several participants cited the hands-on n8n sessions and mentoring from graduate students as highlights, with one noting that seeing the research team at work had made her want to pursue graduate study herself.

Professor Kim’s team has indicated plans to expand the mini-hackathon format beyond Bokja Girls’ High School to other schools and communities in future years. The event was supported by Sogang’s BK21 program team in the Department of Mathematics and Sogang G-LAMP.

On July 27, Sogang University’s newly established Interdisciplinary Program in AI Behavioral Science marked its founding with a seminar titled “Understanding and Evaluating the Social Coexistence of Humans and Artificial Intelligence.” The program, launching in the fall 2026 semester through the Graduate School, held the event at Jeong Ha-sang Hall as an occasion to define its research agenda and bring together scholars from across disciplines.

The seminar was organized around a central premise: that understanding AI in society requires more than technical expertise. The program draws together faculty from psychology, media and communication, technology management, and educational measurement — fields that collectively address how humans perceive, interact with, and are affected by AI systems.

Kyootai Lee, Ph.D., Vice President for Research and professor at the Graduate School of Technology Management, delivered the keynote lecture under the title “AI, Human, and the Future: Creating a New Orient in Sogang,” framing the program’s ambitions within Sogang’s broader research direction.

The seminar proceeded in two sessions. The first covered psychology and media communication. A presentation on perceptual psychology examined the mechanisms by which humans and AI systems perceive their environments and each other. A second presentation addressed the communicative dynamics of human-AI interaction — specifically how conversational exchange shapes behavior.

The second session turned to technology management and educational science. One presentation introduced AI-assisted research methods in technology management, illustrating how AI is both a subject of study and a tool for conducting it. The closing presentation, by program director Professor Hyo Jeong Shin, addressed the methodological challenges of evaluating AI systems — particularly large language models — using frameworks developed for assessing human latent constructs and capabilities.

Professor Shin described AI Behavioral Science as a field oriented toward designing better societies, not merely understanding technology: “This program goes beyond AI itself to comprehensively examine the interaction and behavior between humans and AI — with the goal of using that understanding to build a better social environment.” She expressed hope that the program would grow into a globally recognized research institution contributing to a future in which humans and AI coexist on productive terms.

Sogang University has been designated an AI·Digital (AI·D) Lead University under the Ministry of Education and National Institute for Lifelong Education’s initiative to expand online lifelong learning through universities. The designation recognizes the University’s capacity to deliver AI and digital upskilling programs tailored to the needs of working professionals navigating industry-wide digital transformation.

The recognition follows Sogang’s work in 2025, when it developed and delivered a set of AI·D courses specifically for professionals in the finance and insurance sectors. The three-course package was designed around practical application rather than theoretical instruction. The first course introduced machine learning and deep learning concepts through hands-on Colab sessions. The second addressed how generative AI tools can be applied directly within financial and insurance workflows. The third guided participants through building a personalized AI assistant — including a financial advisor and insurance agent model — using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology. All three courses were taught by faculty from the Department of Mathematics.

Beyond course content, the program introduced a digital badge certification system to formally recognize learning progress and encourage sustained engagement. This combination of applied curriculum and structured credentialing produced a replicable model for AI and digital reskilling that is grounded in actual industry demand.

Sogang has indicated it will continue expanding its AI·D programs for working professionals in 2026, with the aim of strengthening practical AI competency across industries facing accelerating digital transformation.

Sogang University held its May brown-bag seminar under SAIX Peers, focusing on the emerging landscape of vertical AI and its implications for industry transformation and national AI competitiveness. The session featured Professor Du-Seong Chang from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, who framed vertical AI not as a narrowly trained language model, but as a fundamentally different approach to redesigning how industries operate.

Professor Chang’s central argument was that the competitive edge in AI no longer lies in the underlying model itself, but in how an organization restructures its core workflows around AI capabilities — what he described as Vertical AI Transformation. Across sectors including finance, healthcare, law, manufacturing, and energy, the meaningful question is not which model a company uses, but whether it has rebuilt its operational processes in a form that AI can actually execute.

Three elements, he argued, are essential to building effective vertical AI: a high-performance reasoning model, agent-based workflows that reflect real operational logic, and proprietary domain knowledge. A simple chatbot interface is insufficient; genuine industrial application requires AI systems capable of planning, retrieval, tool use, verification, and execution across complex, multi-step processes.

The legal AI company Harvey was presented as a leading example. Built on OpenAI’s models, Harvey’s competitive value derives not from the foundation model itself but from tens of thousands of custom workflows encoding the practical knowledge of working lawyers. The case illustrated a broader point: in the vertical AI era, platform value comes from how deeply a company has mapped and automated the knowledge structures of a specific industry.

The seminar also addressed recent developments in AI agent architecture. Professor Chang described growing interest in a separate policy LLM — trained through reinforcement learning to control tool use, planning, and retrieval independently of the response-generation model. Building simulation environments that replicate real operational contexts, and generating synthetic training data through repeated experimentation within those environments, was identified as an increasingly important direction for agent development.

A significant portion of the discussion turned to AI sovereignty. Professor Chang noted that leading global frontier models are becoming increasingly closed, concentrated among a small number of companies and treated as strategic assets. Over-reliance on foreign models carries long-term risks of technological dependency — a concern that is compounded for Korean-language services, where lower token efficiency relative to English means higher operational costs for equivalent tasks. He argued that developing a fully controllable, high-performance Korean foundation model is not merely a technical goal but a matter of national industrial competitiveness.

Participants broadly agreed that vertical AI-driven transformation across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and law is likely to accelerate in the near term, and that closer collaboration between industry and academia will be essential to building a competitive domestic AI ecosystem.

On May 20, Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Center and BoinIT signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop and operate an online Korean language program under the Sogang TOPIK brand. The partnership responds to growing global demand for structured Korean language education and aims to make systematic TOPIK preparation accessible to learners regardless of location.

The program is designed to serve international students and foreign workers, offering a learning pathway from introductory Korean through to TOPIK examination readiness. Content will be delivered in stages, supplemented by interactive features including topic-based games, practice problem sets, and level assessment tools — elements intended to sustain learner engagement over the course of study.

The collaboration divides responsibilities along each institution’s core strengths. The Korean Language Education Center will draw on its accumulated expertise in Korean language pedagogy to ensure the quality and depth of educational content. BoinIT will provide the online platform infrastructure and operational support to ensure a stable and accessible learning environment.

Director Kim Jinhwa of the Korean Language Education Center and CEO Jongyun Lee of BoinIT formalized the agreement, with both parties indicating plans to accelerate the digital transformation of Korean language education and expand tailored services for global learners.

The Sogang TOPIK online program is expected to contribute to measurable improvements in learners’ TOPIK outcomes while removing the time and geographic barriers that have historically limited access to quality Korean language instruction.

On May 20, Sogang University’s Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute hosted a policy seminar titled “AI and Job Displacement” at the Geppert Nam Duck-Woo Economics Building. The session brought together economists and policy researchers to examine how the spread of AI technologies is affecting labor market structures and to discuss what employment and industrial policy responses are needed.

Two presentations anchored the discussion. Ahram Moon, Group Leader of the AI Economic Policy Group at the Korea Information Society Development Institute, addressed the labor market implications of AI development under the theme of “labor-friendly responses” — arguing that as AI reshapes job structures, policy frameworks must be designed with worker protection as a core objective rather than an afterthought.

Hoon Choi, Professor at Chung-Ang University School of Economics, presented findings from an analysis of Korea’s AI Voucher Program, examining how firm-level AI adoption affects employment outcomes. His research suggested that while AI adoption does not uniformly reduce total employment or wages, it may have a disproportionately negative effect on new hiring — particularly among young workers and those in temporary or daily employment. The paper’s title, “The Erosion of Entry-Level Jobs: AI Adoption and Firm Outcomes from Korea’s AI Voucher Program,” points to a concern that is often underrepresented in aggregate employment statistics.

The discussion session, moderated by a Sogang faculty member, examined whether the employment effects of AI are best understood as a technological shock or as a function of policy design — with participants noting that outcomes are likely to vary significantly depending on the type of AI being adopted, its stage of development, and the institutional context in which it is deployed. Speakers converged on the view that AI diffusion policies should be accompanied by employment impact assessments, job transition support, and reskilling infrastructure.

Director Hyunbae Chun of the Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute described the seminar as an opportunity to examine the effects of AI on labor and industry from multiple angles, and expressed hope that it would contribute to policy thinking that balances technological innovation with employment stability.

Sogang University and the Mapo Foundation for Arts and Culture signed a memorandum of understanding on March 31 at Mapo Art Center, formalizing a partnership aimed at expanding cultural arts access and developing joint programming for students, international scholars, and the broader Mapo community.

The agreement covers five areas of collaboration: industry-academia partnerships linking cultural content with human resources; expanded participation opportunities for both domestic and international students; ongoing joint program development; co-marketing initiatives; and shared infrastructure to strengthen the regional cultural arts ecosystem.

The partnership reflects Sogang’s long-standing engagement with the performing arts. The university’s Merry Hall, which opened in 1970, is the oldest university performance venue in Korea — predating the National Theater by three years — and continues to host over 70 productions annually, including the Seoul World Dance Festival and Seoul International Performing Arts Festival. Uniquely among university theaters in Korea, Mary Hall operates resident companies and functions as an active creative space for students and emerging artists. Its influence on Korean cultural life extends well beyond campus.

The MOU with the Mapo Foundation for Arts and Culture extends this institutional commitment into a formal community partnership. President Shim Jong-hyeok expressed his expectation that the agreement would establish a new model of collaboration linking education, the arts, and local society. Mapo Foundation CEO Ko Young-geun emphasized the joint commitment to creating an environment in which all residents can experience and engage with the arts.

The two institutions plan to pursue ongoing joint projects in support of regional cultural development.

Sogang University’s Character Development Center signed a multi-sector partnership agreement on February 26 at Ulsan Dong-gu District Office, joining POSCO E&C and Korea Habitat in a civil-government-academia initiative to advance sustainable urban development in the Namok neighborhood of Ulsan.

Under the framework, POSCO E&C and Korea Habitat represent the civic sector, Ulsan Dong-gu District the government, and Sogang the academic partner. The initiative centers on Namok’s ongoing urban regeneration project, with a shared goal of improving quality of life for local residents and restoring community cohesion.

The partnership is directly tied to a redesigned course, “Sustainable Development and ESG Practice,” launched in the first semester of 2026 as an inter-university credit-exchange class. A total of 36 students from Sogang, Ewha Womans University, Yonsei University, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea University, and Hongik University are enrolled.

From March 27 to 29, students completed a two-night field program at the Namok Urban Regeneration Field Support Center, visiting POSCO E&C construction sites and the Namok village area, conducting interviews with residents and experts, and developing team project proposals addressing local ESG challenges. The four team projects cover: creating community spaces from vacant properties; designing communication programs between foreign residents and local residents; exploring ways to activate the Namok social cooperative and shared commercial district; and developing resident capacity-building programs.

On April 10, POSCO E&C professional Shin Jun-young delivered a guest lecture on corporate ESG practice and social contribution. Students will continue through online and in-person sessions, team projects, and a final presentation.

Sogang’s Character Development Center has run civil-government-academia-linked coursework since 2024, and aims to expand this project-based learning model to help students develop practical ESG competencies through direct community engagement.

Sogang University’s AI convergence forum SAIXPeers held its April brown bag seminar under the theme “Understanding AI Behavior in Context: A Social Science Perspective,” drawing faculty from across disciplines for an extended discussion on how AI behavior should be studied as a field in its own right.

The session was led by Professor Young June Sah of the Department of Media and Entertainment, who is spearheading the launch of Sogang’s new Interdisciplinary AI Behavioral Studies program. His presentation proposed a paradigm shift: rather than analyzing AI purely through technical architecture, researchers should examine AI behavior through non-technical, social scientific frameworks — studying how AI systems act, learn, and evolve within human social environments.

Professor Sah introduced Tinbergen’s four questions — originally developed in ethology — as an analytical framework adaptable to AI: Mechanism (why does an AI behave as it does?), Development (how does training data shape its behavior?), Function (what role does AI behavior serve in society?), and Evolution (how does AI change through interaction with technology and society?). He argued this framework enables both micro-level analysis of individual AI systems and a macro-level view of the AI ecosystem as a whole.

The seminar also examined AI’s “black box” problem from a behavioral perspective. Drawing on parallels with explainable AI (XAI) research — which compares how AI weights visual inputs against human perceptual processing — Professor Sah suggested that social scientific inquiry into human behavior can generate hypotheses applicable to AI decision-making. One-shot learning, which mirrors how children rapidly acquire concepts from a single exposure, was cited by attendees as an example of human learning principles already informing AI model design.

On the question of harmful outputs, Professor Sah analyzed “toxic degeneration” — AI-generated antisocial or hateful content — through the behavioral lens: as a product of the system’s next-token prediction mechanism combined with biased training data drawn from environments such as Reddit. The framework, he argued, allows researchers to identify and address the social and developmental origins of such behavior, not only its technical causes.

The discussion extended to broader questions of social value. Professor Sah raised the possibility that AI’s displacement of knowledge-based labor could accelerate the decline of credential-driven hierarchies, and questioned whether evolutionary rationales for social institutions such as marriage remain meaningful in an AI-mediated society. Faculty from multiple disciplines engaged with these questions, affirming the value of continued interdisciplinary exchange.

The seminar coincided with the formal announcement of Sogang’s Interdisciplinary AI Behavioral Studies program, to be offered through the Graduate School beginning in the fall 2026 semester. The program integrates psychology, education, media and communication, and technology management, with the aim of training researchers and practitioners equipped to address human-centered challenges in the age of AI. Applications for fall 2026 admission are open from April 30 to May 7; further details are available at https://aibeh.sogang.ac.kr/.