Tag: South Korea

Sogang University held its June brown-bag seminar under SAIX Peers, featuring Professor Dasaem Jeong from the Department of Art & Technology. The session focused on the academic foundations and cultural implications of music AI — a field that has expanded rapidly as generative AI moves beyond language and image into the domain of sound and musical expression.

Professor Jeong introduced her research as spanning music informatics and music AI, with work covering score analysis, music generation, and expressive performance modeling. She shared that her doctoral project, an Expressive Piano Performance Model, was ranked second after a human performer at the 2025 ISMIR international competition. She has also served as General Chair of ISMIR 2025 and as a presenter and organizer at the Dagstuhl Seminar, reflecting sustained engagement with the international music AI research community.

The seminar was organized around three core questions in music AI research: how to encode music into neural networks, how to build scalable music datasets, and whether deep learning can function as a musicological research tool. Professor Jeong noted that music presents a distinct challenge compared to other AI domains — its representational structure requires handling multiple symbolic systems simultaneously, including scores, audio, performance data, and images.

A central case study was a project on AI generation of Korean court music based on jeongganbo — a traditional Korean musical notation system developed during the reign of King Sejong. Rather than converting the notation into Western staff notation, Professor Jeong’s team tokenized the jeongganbo symbols directly, allowing the model to learn the structural logic of the notation on its own terms. “Forcing Western notation standards onto the material,” she explained, “would compromise the structural characteristics of traditional music.” The resulting model was developed in collaboration with the National Gugak Center and realized in performance; the underlying research received the Best Paper Award at ISMIR 2024.

Professor Jeong also presented research on cross-modal conversion between audio and score images, using score videos — widely available on YouTube — as training data. The approach allows image-audio pairs to serve as mutual supervision signals without requiring separately labeled symbolic data, opening a pathway to large-scale music AI training from existing online resources.

The seminar also addressed broader tensions surrounding music AI. Professor Jeong observed that a perception of conflict between AI technology and human creative practice is generating new friction between music technologists and artists. She argued that the more productive question is not what AI will replace, but what kinds of tools can be designed to deepen human engagement with art: “We should be asking how to design technology that allows people to participate more fully in music — not what AI will take over.”

Participants agreed that music AI has the potential to reshape the experience of art itself, and that the field calls for ongoing dialogue between technical development and artistic practice.

On June 11, Sogang University’s Center for Teaching & Learning hosted a community outreach program for high school students, bringing university-level AI education to twenty-two participants from Sungmun High School. The program was developed in partnership with the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (Western District) and Sungmun High School, and was designed to help students build foundational understanding of artificial intelligence and explore related career pathways.

The session featured a lecture by Professor Jon-Lark Kim of the Department of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Data Science, titled “AI and Its Story with a Mathematician.” Professor Kim traced the development of AI technology and introduced the mathematical principles underlying modern AI systems, drawing on a range of applied examples to make the material accessible to a high school audience.

The lecture covered recent trends in generative AI and illustrated how AI is applied in actual research and industry settings. Professor Kim also demonstrated a chatbot developed at Sogang, giving students direct exposure to a working AI system built on campus. A Q&A session followed, during which students engaged actively with questions about both the technology and its broader implications.

The program is part of Sogang’s ongoing use of its K-MOOC course offerings as a bridge between university research and local communities. The Center for Teaching & Learning has indicated plans to expand lecture and learning programs linked to K-MOOC content, with the aim of providing high-quality educational experiences to youth in the surrounding region.

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.