Tag: South Korea

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.

X205 — a student startup team from Sogang University’s Department of Art & Technology — received an excellence award at the 5th World ESG Forum University Startup Competition, organized by the Korean ESG Association. The four-member team, comprising Jong-ho Park, Yoon-seo Choi, Ji-yoon Kim, and Dong-jun Lim, shared the honor with one other team and was recognized for an entry that combined educational technology with local economic engagement.

Their concept, “Heoripizza,” is an AI-assisted local board game designed to develop spatial reasoning in children and adolescents while incorporating content drawn from local businesses and communities. The premise — that a game can simultaneously serve as a learning tool and a platform for regional collaboration — drew positive attention from judges for its potential as both an edtech product and a model for community-linked content development.

The team’s background reflects Sogang’s broader approach to interdisciplinary education. The Department of Art & Technology sits at the intersection of creative practice and technological application, and the X205 project illustrates how that combination can translate into socially oriented entrepreneurship. The team credited Sogang’s entrepreneurship support infrastructure — including mentoring and development resources provided through the University’s startup programs — as a foundation for turning their concept into a competition-ready venture.

That infrastructure is part of a wider institutional commitment. Through initiatives such as the Campus Town Project and Open Innovation Center 2.0, Sogang has built a startup ecosystem that connects student ideas with commercialization pathways, industry collaboration, and community engagement. The University’s approach to entrepreneurship explicitly prioritizes social and environmental value alongside economic outcomes — an alignment that made the ESG competition a natural fit.

Kwanwoo Shin, Director of the Startup Support Division, noted that the award reflects growing student capacity to develop creativity-driven, ESG-aligned ventures: “We will continue linking campus innovation programs to ensure strong support for youth entrepreneurship and practice-centered education.”

The team has indicated plans to expand beyond a single game product toward a broader platform for bringing participatory play culture to underserved communities.