KAIST

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen! Let me first express my gratitude to Chairman Dae-Hwan Chang and staff of Maekyung Media Group for the generous invitation to this wonderful forum.

It is indeed my great pleasure and privilege to participate in this session together with Andrew Hamilton, president of New York University.

I am going to deliver a presentation on transforming universities for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

We are now in a period of great transformation, which is called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to Chairman Klaus Schwab, the breadth, depth, and speed of the revolution will be unprecedented in history.

In the period of the pre-industrial revolution, human development was almost negligible for 10,000 years. The past three industrial revolutions occurred last 250 years have brought about substantial human development. However, in the coming years of the 4th IR, we will encounter unprecedented exponential changes in human development.

Then, what are the megatrends that will cause the unprecedented exponential changes in the era of the 4th IR?

Well, I would like to point out three megatrends.

The first is hyperconnectivity.

Now, 65% of the whole population use mobile phones and 48% of the population uses the Internet. Also, there are more than 28 billion devices connected via IoTs.

In the coming years, the number of mobile users and IoTs are expected to exponentially increase. Within 30 years, all of the people and electronic devices in the world are anticipated to become connected and will communicate at the speed of light.

So, we will live in a hyper-connected society characterized by collective intelligence, collaboration via crowd sourcing, and a sharing economy.

The second is the superintelligence realized by the rapid progress of AI via the technologies of deep learning, brain science, and big data, together with advance in computer hardware.

We, human beings, were so shocked by the facts that Google-developed AI, Alphago, achieved landslide victories against human Go champions such as Grandmaster Se-Dol Lee and Grandmaster Ke Jie. With such rapid development of AI, as Ray Kurzweil predicted, we might face the singularity point within 30 years when AI surpasses human intelligence.

AI is already everywhere!

AI is the enabler of diverse industries including speech processing, big data, and data mining.

AI is assisting various professional jobs in the areas of medicine, law, finance, painting, and research.

In the near future, AI robots, which I call “Robo sapiens,” will be omnipresent as a guide robot, a chatting robot, an AI Golfer playing a hole-in-one, and an AI gymnast.

So, we have to think seriously about the identity of human being. We, Homo sapiens, will not be able to compete with Robo sapiens with regard to memory, information processing and calculating, and functional and physical abilities.

We should further cultivate the irreplaceable merits of human being such as creativity, empathy, insight, and wisdom to seek symbiosis between Homo sapiens and Robo sapiens.

The third is Meta-Convergence.

New findings and innovations mostly occur through interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches, in particular via ‘NBIC’ (nano, bio, information, and cognitive science) convergence.

Moreover, we will live in a society where the Physical, Cyber, and Biological systems are conjoined by sensing, communication, computation, and control, namely, ‘the meta-convergence world.’

In particular, smart industries in the Fourth Industrial Revolution such as smart car, smart city, smart factory, fintech, etc. are realized by the convergence of AI with big data, IoT, cloud computing, and 5G.

Considering all these megatrends, university reform is imperative and urgent for the 4^thIR, in particular, with respect to education, research, and technology commercialization.

Futurist Thomas Frey predicts that 50% of the present universities will disappear by 2030.

Let me first discuss the Innovation for Education.

What kind of manpower should be fostered for the era of the 4^th IR?

My answer is to foster talent equipped for; Challenge that can cope with unsolved problems and unknown ways not yet taken, Creativity for solving the problems with innovative ideas via collaboration, and Caring with an attitude of inclusiveness and ethical responsibility, so called C³ talent.

To foster C³ talents, I would like to propose whole brain training by strengthening basic education including strong basic science and engineering education, together with diversifying education in the humanities, social sciences, and arts.

For whole brain education, I suggest a non-department educational system for the undergraduate program. This is a model that I implemented at DGIST as the founding president of the university.

For three years, students are educated to build a solid background in basic science and engineering, with diverse knowledge of humanities and social sciences, leadership, and entrepreneurship.

When students become seniors, they take customized-education track depending on their future career paths.

This non-department educational track will be also implemented at KAIST from next year, in addition to the existing department track for specific majors.

I would like stress that Caring attitude is so important in the 4th IR society, because we expect Smart Digital World which will bring Utopia to human beings.

However, we are facing the dark side of the digital society caused by malicious usage of email and SNS, cyberbullying, and unethical applications of AI, which will bring about chaotic dystopia rather than digital utopia.

So, we need to put tremendous efforts into ethical education for caring to guard against the potential dark side of the digital society. Ethical education includes social responsibility when utilizing and manipulating digital devices, ethics of big data, ethics of algorithms, and ethics of practices. I would like to emphasize that we have to implement ethical education not only for human beings but also for AI robots.

It should be mentioned that we need to transform teaching and learning methods. KAIST is implementing the flipped learning classes composed of online video learning and offline discussion-based learning.

We have established various smart learning infrastructures including flipped learning classrooms, smart studios, and smart LMS.

We also opened a virtual university adopting real-time online classes for company employees to take classes at their job sites.

Now, let me shift gears to discuss innovation for research.

What is Excellent Research?

That is not fast-follower but first-mover R&D aiming to be the world’s best, or first, or only one, which brings about a global impact by creating new knowledge or creating economic value, so called U-shaped R&D outcomes.

Then, how can we achieve excellent research for the 4^th IR?

One of the ways is to carry out cross-disciplinary convergence research, because innovative and disruptive R&D outputs happen through cross-disciplinary collaboration, rather than a single professor’s effort in one particular field.

For that, it is desirable to implement a convergent research matrix system so that professors and students from different majors participate in convergence projects. To boost collaboration, we removed the walls between adjacent labs located in the KAIST Institute building.

Here is one example of convergence research carried out at KAIST called the ‘Dr. M’ project. The research aim is to build an innovative smart mobile healthcare system that collects and syntagmatically analyzes a user’s various bio-signals and then, provide services to customers in real time.

This project is carried out via convergent collaboration among various experts in bio-signal sensors, batteries, IoT, big data and other fields from 7 departments and 8 companies.

I would like to mention that AI is very important in convergence research.

Here are a couple of examples: This is the research on AI-based fake news detection aiming to distinguish between fake news and factual news. This is the research on AI-based drone swarm to control many drones simultaneously.

Finally, I would like to discuss innovation for technology commercialization.

Universities in the era of the 4th IR should serve not only as cradles of new knowledge generation but also as hubs for research, development, and business (R&DB) to create value-added knowledge. So, entrepreneurial university will have an important role in the era of the 4^th IR.

For entrepreneurship education, KAIST is carrying out various programs. One of them is the convergence capstone design program for undergraduates.

A company initially proposes an on-site problem. Then, several students with different majors participate to solve the problem under the supervision of a professor. The students propose a business model through this program.

We strongly encourage our students and professors to establish startups. To support them we have launched the Institute of Startup KAIST. The mission of ISK is to develop a successful tech-based Korean startup model with cultural diffusion via entrepreneurship and startup education, an ecosystem of pre-acceleration, and globalization of market.

KAIST has launched 90 startup ventures during over the last four years. Some of them are demonstrated here.

In conclusion, the 4^th IR calls for reforming higher education to nurture new talents equipped for challenge, creativity, and caring.

In addition, the role of university should be transformed to serve as entrepreneurial university with R&DB.

KAIST is taking the lead in innovation through various institutional reform action plans which help become a global value creator.