Highlights
[CEO Seminar] September 17 (Wed) – Hwang Chul-Joo, Chairman & CEO of Jusung Engineering: Semiconductors in the Era of AI
The School of Business and Technology Management at KAIST hosts the CEO Seminar Series, inviting distinguished experts from various fields to foster entrepreneurship and share first-hand experiences from the global business arena.
For the third seminar of the 2025 Fall semester, we are honored to welcome Hwang Chul-Joo, Chairman & CEO of Jusung Engineering, as our guest speaker.
We kindly invite all professors, students, and staff members to join us and look forward to your active participation.
■ Event Information
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Date & Time: Wednesday, September 17, 4:00 PM
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Venue: Room 103, N22
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Speaker: Hwang Chul-Joo, Chairman & CEO of Jusung Engineering
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Topic: Semiconductors in the Era of AI
■ Speaker Introduction
Chairman Hwang Chul-Joo founded Jusung Engineering in 1995 and has since been leading the company as Chairman & CEO.
Jusung Engineering is a global technology leader in semiconductor, display, and solar cell manufacturing equipment, recognized for its strong competitiveness. In particular, the company pioneered the localization of core semiconductor equipment such as deposition processes (CVD, ALD, etc.), securing proprietary technologies.
Jusung Engineering has developed numerous world-first and world-class equipment solutions and maintains partnerships with major global companies such as SK hynix and CXMT (China’s largest DRAM manufacturer). As a KOSDAQ-listed company, Jusung holds a significant position in the global semiconductor equipment market. The company is currently valued at approximately KRW 1.3 trillion in market capitalization and achieved KRW 400 billion in revenue and KRW 100 billion in net profit in 2024, demonstrating strong growth momentum in the AI-driven era.
Beyond business leadership, Chairman Hwang contributes actively to Korea’s innovation ecosystem as Honorary Chairman of the Korea Venture Business Association and Chairman of the Ilun Science and Technology Foundation. His contributions have been widely recognized through numerous honors, including:
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2019: Selected as one of Korea’s Top 100 CEOs by Maekyung Economy
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2011: Gold Tower Order of Industrial Service Merit at the Korea Technology Awards
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2006: Presidential Award at the Korea Semiconductor Technology Awards
Chairman Hwang Chul-Joo is regarded as one of the foremost leaders representing Korea’s technology venture industry.
We’re opening the fall series with a talk by Hyungu Hwang, CEO of ToBScommunication Inc.: “Hyper-connected drone communication technology adopted by the Korean government opens the era of fully autonomous flight.”
This semester’s lineup brings together industrial, governmental, and academic leaders, including:
- Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau — Professor of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison; co-author of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, one of the most popular and widely used textbooks in the field
- Prof. Kathleen A. Kramer — President and CEO of IEEE, and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of San Diego
The series also includes a lecture by IITP Program Manager (PM) Seongho Choi on the national R&D policy direction on network technologies in the AI era, and a special talk by Prof. Yoonhak Baek, well known as both an electrical engineer and conductor, who will share an engineer’s perspectives on the beauty of music and science.
All students and faculty are encouraged to join!
🗓 Thursdays, 4:00 PM
📍 Lecture Hall 1, Information & Electronics Building (E3-1), KAIST EE
(Please refer to the poster for full details and schedule.)
Professor Jae-Woong Jeong of our School has been selected as the recipient of the Scientist of the Month Award for September.
The Scientist of the Month Award, jointly awarded by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea, is given monthly to one researcher who has made significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology by producing outstanding R&D achievements over the past three years. The award includes the Minister’s commendation and a prize of 10 million KRW.
Professor Jeong was selected in recognition of his contributions to healthcare innovation through convergent research on wearable and implantable electronic devices and medical equipment. In particular, ahead of World Patient Safety Day(September 17), he developed an intravenous needle that softens at body temperature, thereby enhancing patient safety.
Intravenous (IV) injection is a method of delivering drugs directly into the bloodstream, enabling rapid effects and continuous administration. However, conventional IV needles made of rigid metal or plastic can damage vascular walls, cause complications such as phlebitis, and pose risks of accidental needle-stick injuries and subsequent infections among medical staff during disposal.
Professor Jeong developed a variable-stiffness* needle utilizing the property of liquid metal gallium, which changes phase from solid to liquid in response to body temperature. This innovation allows the needle to remain rigid at room temperature for insertion but become soft and tissue-like once inside the body. * Variable stiffness: The ability to adjust stiffness (degree of hardness) depending on situations or conditions.
This softening IV needle not only ensures patients’ freedom of movement but also prevents needle-stick injuries among medical staff by remaining soft at room temperature after use, while fundamentally blocking unethical reuse of needles.
Furthermore, Professor Jeong also addressed the issue of drug leakage during IV injection, which causes local tissue temperature to drop. By integrating a nanoscale thin-film temperature sensor into the IV needle, he realized a real-time monitoring system of local body temperature, enabling immediate detection of IV drug leakage.
This research achievement, which provides a new vision for improving patient safety and ensuring healthcare worker protection in line with the requirements of the World Health Organization, was published as the cover article of the international journal Nature Biomedical Engineering in August 2024.
Professor Jeong stated, “This study is significant because it proposes a way to overcome the problems caused by conventional rigid medical needles and to prevent infections due to needle-stick accidents or reuse. Going forward, we will continue R&D efforts so that the softening needle technology can evolve into a core technology that enhances safety for both patients and medical staff in clinical practice.”
With the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the end of 2022, generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have become one of the central research areas in artificial intelligence. Today, LLMs are evolving beyond simply understanding prompts and providing answers, into LLM Agents capable of interacting with their environments, engaging in multi-round actions, observations, and reasoning to accomplish assigned tasks. Such Agentic AI represents a key direction for future development, where AI systems autonomously interact with the environment to execute tasks without human intervention.
For example, when a household robot is given the task of “cooking soybean paste stew,” it must independently identify and gather the necessary ingredients, prepare them, place them in a pot, put the pot on the stove, turn on the heat, cook the stew, and finally turn off the stove once the dish is complete. Humans cannot provide instructions for each and every of these steps one by one: the robot must act, observe the results, reason about them, and determine its next action autonomously.
A representative LLM Agent model for this purpose is ReAct, introduced in 2023 by Google Brain and Princeton University. ReAct decides on actions step by step while taking future plans into account. However, ReAct suffers from limitations, as it often hallucinates or produces actions disconnected from reality.
To overcome these shortcomings, PhD student Jeonghye Kim and Master student Sojeong Rhee from Professor Youngchul Sung’s lab, in collaboration with Professor Kyomin Jung’s lab at Seoul National University, proposed a new LLM Agent model called ReflAct. The proposed ReflAct simultaneously considers the ultimate goal and the current situation at each step, thereby significantly reducing hallucination and enabling the agent to recognize its own mistakes. When combined with state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs, ReflAct achieved an impressive 93.3% task success rate on the ALFWorld benchmark, a simulated household environment.
This result is expected to accelerate the development of Agentic AI not only for household assistants but also for diverse applications such as scientific exploration and military operations. The work will be presented at the Main Conference of EMNLP 2025 this coming November.
Paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15182
We are pleased to announce that our alumnus, Dr. Jaehong Kim (advised by Prof. Dongsu Han), has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, College of Software Convergence at Inha University, effective September 1, 2025.
Dr. Kim earned his Ph.D. from KAIST in August 2024. His research focuses on AI for video streaming, immersive media, and networked systems. During his graduate studies, he conducted innovative research on neural-enhanced video delivery, 3D live streaming, and 5G network optimization. He has published papers at premier venues including SIGCOMM, CoNEXT (Best Paper Finalist), OSDI, and EuroSys.
He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department, supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. His current research includes 3D Gaussian Splatting compression and delivery, and AI-augmented video delivery for immersive media. His outstanding research achievements have been recognized with the 2022 Samsung Humantech Paper Award Gold Prize (1st place in Communication & Network), and selection as KAIST Breakthrough of the Year 2021.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Kim on his appointment.
Professor Jaehong Kim’s website: https://jaykim305.github.io/
Dr. Sangmin Lee, who earned his Ph.D. from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST in 2023, has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Korea University, starting September 2025.
Following his doctoral studies, Dr. Lee conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he delved deeply into the field of Multimodal Learning. His recent work expands into Social AI, focusing on understanding and predicting human social interactions through multimodal technologies.
Dr. Lee has garnered attention for his cutting-edge research, with multiple publications at CVPR, the premier conference on computer vision, demonstrating his global competitiveness in the field.
We extend our congratulations to Dr. Lee and celebrate the continued excellence of KAIST School of Electrical Engineering alumni. We look forward to his future contributions to academia and beyond.
We are pleased to announce that our alumnus, Dr. Ranggi Hwang (advised by Prof. Minsoo Rhu), has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), effective September 1, 2025.
Dr. Hwang earned his Ph.D. from KAIST in August 2025. His research centers on computer architecture, with a particular focus on hardware–software co-design for AI. During his graduate studies, he designed GPU systems and AI accelerators for a range of AI workloads, including recommender systems, graph algorithms, and privacy-preserving AI. He has published papers at top venues such as ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, and ASPLOS.
He also completed research internships at Microsoft Research and NVIDIA Research, where he developed memory- and power-efficient GPU systems for large language model (LLM) inference. His service to the research community includes the MICRO 2025 External Review Committee (ERC) and the HPCA 2026 Program Committee (PC).
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Hwang on his appointment.
Professor Ranggi Hwang’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/unist-cocolab
