Tag: South Korea

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/.

On April 8, Sogang University marked Disability Awareness Day with a gathering in the lobby of Ignatius Hall. Co-hosted by the Campus Ministry Affairs, the Institute for Global Engagement & Sustainability, and the Support Center for Students with Disabilities, the event brought together around twenty participants — students, intern staff, support workers, and administrators — for a shared meal, open conversation, and a closing song performed together. Participants exchanged accounts of everyday challenges on campus, and the occasion was held under the slogan: “Everyday life, accessible to all.”

The event reflected something broader than a single annual observance. Sogang has spent decades building what it describes as a comprehensive support system for students with disabilities — known on campus as Dasoni students — covering academic accommodation, campus mobility, assistive technology, financial support, and career preparation. The University’s Support Center for Students with Disabilities coordinates these services across the full student lifecycle, from pre-admission orientation through graduation and employment transition.

That commitment has drawn national recognition. Sogang has been rated top university five consecutive times in the Korean government’s evaluation of educational welfare support for students with disabilities through 2020 — a distinction that reflects sustained institutional investment rather than isolated effort.

In practice, support takes several forms. Students with disabilities receive priority classroom allocation, extended exam time, individual testing spaces, and note-taking assistance through a structured peer support personnel programme. Faculty are formally notified of required accommodations through official letters issued under the President’s name. For students with mobility needs, campus facilities include accessible parking, ramps, elevators, and automatic doors, with classroom relocation arranged where necessary. Assistive devices — ranging from electric wheelchairs and portable lifts to Braille tools, FM hearing systems, and OCR software — are available for loan through the Center.

The library operates its own access scheme, offering flexible borrowing and return options including on-campus delivery, extended loan periods, designated seating, and reading enlargement stations for students with visual impairments.

Financial support is also structured into the system. The Xavier Scholarship for Students with Disabilities covers between one-third and two-thirds of tuition fees, supplemented by alumni-based scholarships and living support schemes. Dormitory priority and partial fee support are available for students with significant accessibility needs.

The human dimension of this system was visible this March, when Han Joo-sung and Yu Min-woo — students in the Department of Media and Entertainment — received the grand prize at the inaugural Lotte Foundation Social Contribution Video Contest. Their 60-second film, produced under the team name Albatros, documented a student-led effort to place Braille stickers at key locations across campus. Competing against 197 other teams, the pair were recognized for turning a practical act of care into a story with wider resonance. “Our small gestures of consideration,” Han said, “can become the starting point for positive change across the entire campus.”

That instinct — that access is a shared responsibility rather than a special accommodation — traces back further still. When the late Professor Young-hee Chang, herself a wheelchair user, lobbied the University to install an elevator in Ignatius Hall, the result was a tower-shaped lift clad in the building’s own red brick, used by everyone on campus. It remains one of the more enduring illustrations of what disability access, done well, can look like: not a workaround, but part of the fabric of the place.

On March 25, Sogang University’s Research & Business Development Foundation hosted an information session at Hotel Naru for small and mid-sized enterprises interested in the Public-Private Joint Technology Commercialization R&D program, known as TRL Jump-Up. Over 100 company representatives and researchers attended — a strong turnout for a first session — reflecting broad industry interest in the initiative.

The TRL Jump-Up program is a public-private joint R&D scheme designed to raise the Technology Readiness Level of high-complexity, early-stage technologies in national strategic sectors and carry them through to commercialization. In December 2025, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups selected Sogang University and KAIST as the two operational support institutions for the program, with approximately 2.9 billion KRW allocated per institution. Sogang began operations in January 2026.

Under the program, Sogang supports two stages: Phase 1 project planning and Phase 2 commercialization R&D. The Foundation is building a full-cycle support structure covering technology development, commercialization, and post-project performance management.

At the session, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and TIPA (Korea Technology and Information Promotion Agency for SMEs) outlined the program’s objectives and application requirements. Sogang then presented Request for Proposal (RFP) documents selected for their technological differentiation and commercialization potential, followed by an in-depth Q&A on proposal writing.

Professor Hongseok Kim, head of the TRL Jump-Up initiative and Vice President of the Research & Business Development Foundation, described the program’s aim as ensuring that promising laboratory technologies are not abandoned before reaching the market: “We will commit fully to full-cycle support so that high-potential technologies can find their place in actual industrial settings.”

Sogang has indicated it will continue working closely with the Ministry and TIPA to lower participation barriers for companies and strengthen the support infrastructure for technology-driven commercialization.

What does inclusion look like in practice, across history and across cultures? That was the question at the center of a four-day field program organized by Sogang University’s HUSS Initiative for Inclusive Society, which brought twenty undergraduate students to Shanghai from April 2 to 5.

The program, titled “Civilization, Empire, and Exile: Reading the History of Inclusive Society in Shanghai,” was designed around a central premise: that Shanghai’s layered urban history offers an unusually rich site for examining how societies have — and have not — made room for those pushed to their margins. Students approached the city through three thematic lenses. The first traced the formation of Yangtze River civilization and Shanghai’s early cultural foundations. The second examined the city’s development as an imperial international port, where competing colonial powers left visible marks on the built environment. The third turned to histories of refuge and displacement — the Korean independence movement, Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai during the Second World War, and the experiences of comfort women documented in the city’s historical record.

The itinerary moved through these layers directly. Participants visited the Shanghai Museum and Guangfulin Relics Park before walking the Bund and Nanjing Road, where the architecture of the imperial era remains largely intact. They then visited the former site of the Korean Provisional Government and the Yun Bong-gil Memorial, followed by the Jewish Refugees Museum and a museum dedicated to the history of comfort women.

Preparation began well before departure. From March onward, students worked in small groups through a series of seminars, researching and presenting on their assigned sub-themes before applying that groundwork to what they encountered on site. Five faculty members from the Department of History accompanied and guided the program throughout.

For one participant, the experience reframed a city she thought she knew. Kim Jin-seo (History, ’22) reflected that beneath Shanghai’s reputation as a cosmopolitan metropolis, she found “a historical layer of inclusion through exile and memory” — and that witnessing how the city had offered refuge to Korean independence activists and Jewish refugees alike led her to conclude that a truly inclusive society begins with making space for the marginalized and committing to remember their experiences.

A closing outcomes session is scheduled for April 9 on campus. The HUSS Initiative for Inclusive Society has indicated it will continue developing field-based global programs aimed at equipping students with the interdisciplinary perspective and civic sensibility needed to engage with questions of inclusion, equity, and justice — in history and in the present.

Sogang University held its March brown-bag seminar under SAIX Peers, focusing on the current state and industrial trajectory of robot AI. The session featured Professor Changjoo Nam from the Department of Electronic Engineering and founder of Vertical Labs, a university-affiliated startup developing data collection platforms for robot learning, who presented on manipulation, humanoid robotics, and the shift toward action-generating AI systems.

Professor Nam opened with a framing observation: as AI moves beyond large language models into systems capable of physical action, the central question in robotics is no longer perception or language understanding alone, but how a model translates situational awareness into movement. He described the growing adoption of end-to-end learning architectures, in which a single model learns directly from sensor input to motor output, replacing earlier modular pipelines. At the core of this shift are Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate visual encoders and language models to interpret context and map generated tokens onto joint values for physical execution.

The seminar also addressed world models — systems that predict how an environment will change in response to a given action, enabling simulation-based verification before physical execution. Professor Nam noted that the physical cost of trial-and-error in real environments makes such predictive modelling increasingly important: “The model that generates actions and the world model that verifies them in advance are developing together.”

Discussion turned to the question of what learning paradigms are most effective for robot AI. Professor Nam acknowledged that while foundation models are expanding in scope, direct application to real-world settings remains difficult, and that additional data-driven fine-tuning is typically required on the ground. On reinforcement learning, he highlighted the exploration-exploitation tradeoff: broad exploration is theoretically valuable but practically constrained in physical environments, where repeated attempts risk damaging objects or requiring continuous environmental reset. Simulation-based training therefore remains the dominant approach for exploration-heavy tasks. For specific industrial processes, imitation learning — training robots on recorded human demonstrations — offers a more data-efficient path to reliable performance.

On application domains, Professor Nam drew a contrast between entertainment and manufacturing. Humanoid robots in entertainment operate in contexts where failure is tolerable; manufacturing and logistics demand precision, but involve a more bounded set of tasks, making them more immediately suited to deployment. Drawing on his experience at Vertical Labs, he argued that the real answers lie in the field: “You have to go to the site, collect the data directly, and build from there.” He added that small and mid-sized manufacturers are not looking for general-purpose systems but for process-level automation — and that AI enables faster deployment than traditional systems integration approaches.

The session illustrated how robot AI is moving from a research-stage technology into active industrial application, with Professor Nam’s dual role as researcher and founder offering a grounded perspective on both the technical possibilities and the practical constraints of current systems.