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  • A Farewell Interview with Ms. Eun-Young Park

    Ms. Eun-Young Park, who had been working for the School of Computing for 21 years, has transferred to another department. She always took care of the office with a smile, and we believe that she will help many KAIST members on a new place as well. Please tell us a little about yourself. I began working for KAIST after I graduated from my school in 1994. Therefore, I got my first job with the first-year graduate students who entered the school in the same year. I have two daughters, and my husband also works for KAIST. I majored in Chinese Language and Literature. Thank you for working hard for 21 years in the KAIST School of Computing. Is there any impressive moment of life during your stay in the department? There were many impressive and exciting moments. Especially, I remember when students were doing Samgyeopsal party in front of the Computer Science building. I also remember that recently Sang-Won Seo, the doctoral student, donated a scholarship to the department. I was touched by Mr. Seo that he was willing to donate as an appreciation for the school. I believe donating is not an easy job for a student. Is there anything you are proud of as a KAIST member? I am proud of that KAIST is on broadcast on every day’s morning news, and I think KAIST leads the scientific research of Korea. In addition, I always believe that Korea has a bright future in science for having students studying hard all day and night. As a parent, I wish my children would also attend the great school like KAIST. Is there any more things you want to say? Because I got married and raised two children during the stay, I feel that I grew up together with the School of Computing, and I was happy for having so much together with the School of Computing. For I love meeting people, I enjoyed meeting and having conversations with students, and I will miss those moments. The School of Computing will be my hometown in my heart. Now, I would meet new people in the new department and have a new relationship with them… Ms. Park, thank you again for everything! We will all miss you very much!

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  • Announcement of New Professor, Sung-Ju Lee

    Professor Sung-Ju Lee has joined our School of Computing on April 1st, 2015. Professor Lee obtained the Ph.D. majoring in network, mobility, wireless, systems, and security with research into foundation, design, and social computing from UCLA. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Lee. Website: https://sites.google.com/site/wewantsj/ E-mail: sjlee (at) cs.kaist.ac.kr Phone: 042-350-3566 Laboratory: N1, 706

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  • Qualcomm Innovation Award 2015

    Here are the teams have won the Qualcomm Innovation Award 2015 in the School of Computing. Congratulations for winning the award: Sung-Ho Bae, Munchurl Kim, “HEVC-based Perceptual Video Coding Using a Local Distortion Detection Probability Model” Honggu Lee, Soohwan Song, Sungho Jo, “3D Reconstruction using a Sparse Laser Scanner and a Single Camera for Outdoor Autonomous Vehicle” Duc Hoang Bui, Hyosu Kim, Insik Shin, “Energy-Efficient Web Page Loading on Smartphones” Wonseok Jeon, Sae-Young Chung, “Superdirectivity in Wireless Channels” Dai-Kyung Hyun, Han-Ul Jang, and Heung-Kyu Lee, “Source Camera Identification Using Triangle-Test” Hyosu Kim, Insik Shin, “Application Characteristics-Aware Audio Device Management on Commodity Mobile Devices” Hak-Yeol Choi, Dai-Kyung Hyun, Heung-Kyu Lee, “Resampling Detection for DIBR 3D Images” Soohwan Song, Honggu Lee, Sungho Jo, “Boundary Enhanced Supervoxel Segmentation for Sparse Outdoor LiDAR data and Its Application”

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  • A KAIST Student Invented a Low-Cost 3D Printer: “T..

    A KAIST Student Invented a Low-Cost 3D Printer: “Terrific!” “I found out that there were so many inconvenient features on the previous 3D printers, so I decided to create a new one for people to use conveniently.” Seok-hyeon Seo (23-year old, Computer Science, KAIST), who is a college student and has succeeded on business by inventing the cheapest 3D printer, said, “A good product has to be easy to use for many people.” He also said, “If I improve the performance continuously, the product will not only cheap but also shows a good performance.” Last year, Mr. Seo, Sung-hyun Cho (22, Mechanical Engineering, KAIST), Jong-hoon Choi, Won-hee Kim (21, Mechanical Engnieering), and Dong-jin Kim (23, Oxford Univ.) has gained attention for inventing a 3D printer costs about 900,000 won, which is a quite cheap price. They received about 100 pre-orders for 3D printer before the release, and they founded a company called, ‘KAIDEA’. They entrusted the business management section to the professionals, so they are only focusing on the product development. As the order continues, KAIDEA is planning to increase the number of factories in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do during the first half of this year, and they are planning to make inroads into a larger market abroad, which is the expected the scale of 13.5 billion won in 2018. Mr. Seo said, “We have decided to leave the management part to the professionals since the beginning of designing the product.” He also said, “Since all of my friends are pursuing their own study, I think we made a right choice for the management part.” The idea of developing a low-cost 3D print came from ‘KAIST idea factory’. The idea factory is an open studio at trial, supported by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy, to help college students to perform an experiment and create a prototype with their creative idea. He said, “The idea factory made possible to develop a 3D printer.” He also said, “Because there are a number of equipment tools with additional financial support for materials, everyone can invent with their own ideas.” As for his future plan, he said, “I want to enter the graduate school in KAIST to study more after graduating next year,” and he show his ambition by saying, “I want to study more to give technological benefits to many people.”

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  • Top 10 Representative Research and Staff of the Ye..

    On February 17th, the Computer Science department have chosen top 10 representative research and staff of the year for the 44th school anniversary as the following: Professor Jong-Cheol Park: a web tool for searching the meaningful relationship between cancer and heredity from biomedical bibliographic databases. Awarded staff of the year for the 44th year school foundation anniversary Contribution award: Bangyoun Weon Excellent staff award: YunJeong Lee Professor Junehwa Song: Awarded Excellent Faculty (Academic Award) for the 44th year school foundation anniversary

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  • ACM Interactions: Day in the Lab: “KAIST’s Human-C..

    Interactions, a bi-monthly magazine published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest educational and scientific computing society in the world, features an article that introduces the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab at KAIST in its latest issue of March and April 2015 (http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/march-april-2015/human-computer-interaction-lab-kaist). The HCI Lab (http://hcil.kaist.ac.kr/) is run by Professor Geehyuk Lee of the Computer Science Department at KAIST. Started in 2002, the lab conducts various research projects to improve the design and operation of physical user interfaces and develop new interaction techniques for new types of computers. For the article, please go to the link below: ACM Interactions, March and April 2015 Day in the Lab: Human-Computer Interaction Lab @ KAIST http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/march-april-2015/human-computer-interaction-lab-kaist

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  • A Doctoral Student of KAIST Donates Scholarship to..

    Sang-Won Seo, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science at KAIST, recently donated USD 9,300 to the university to support joint degree programs with international universities. He received dual degrees himself for the Bachelor of Science both from KAIST and the Technical University of Berlin in Germany in 2009. Explaining his reason to donate, Sang-Won said, “I have always felt grateful for the support I received from KAIST during my study abroad. I’m glad for this opportunity to return to my alma mater what I have received.” In the picture below, Sang-Won Seo (fourth from the left) and his adviser Professor Seungryoul Maeng (to the right next to Seo) pose together holding the certificate of appreciation on January 14, 2015.

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  • Research on MapReduce Triangle Enumeration

    [Prof. U Kang] The triangle enumeration problem is regarded as one of the fundamental graph mining problems. Its various applications include measuring content quality in social networks and finding spam pages on the Web. With massive input graphs, issues related to the performance of the network and to system failure may arise. To address the issues, this paper describes a new multi-round MapReduce randomized algorithm for enumerating all triangles. The experimental evaluation shows the scalability of the proposed approach – that it can significantly increase the size of data sets that can be processed. [Acknowledgement] · This work was supported by the IT R&D program of MSIP/IITP. [10044970, Development of Core Technology for Human-like Self-taught Learning based on Symbolic Approach]. [Publication] · This was presented at ACM International Conference on Information Knowledge Management (CIKM 2014), which is the most prestigious conference in the field of data mining. [Reference] · Ha-Myung Park, Francesco Silvestri, U Kang, Rasmus Pagh (2014), "MapReduce Triangle Enumeration With Guarentees," ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2014

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  • Professor HeungKyu Lee Awarded for Technological I..

    Professor HeungKyu Lee received the 2014 Technology Innovation Award for his contributions to innovative research in the field of computer science. The 2014 Technology Innovation Award, given on December 15, 2014, offers 3,000,000 KRW to the awardee. Upon receiving the award, Professor Lee has donated 1,000,000 KRW to the KAIST CS department. Congratulations!

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  • Research Team led by Professors Junehwa Song and I..

    Research Team led by Professors Junehwa Song and Insik Shin developed a method that utilizes multiple smartphone speakers to produce 5.1-channel surround sound. For the news article in Korean, please visit, http://www.hankyung.com/news/app/newsview.php?aid=2014123010377

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  • Hwi Ahn Wins SIGAPP Student Travel Award

    Hwi Ahn Wins SIGAPP Student Travel Award Hwi Ahn, Ph.D. Student from KAIST Software Architecture Laboratory, won the SIGAPP Student Travel Award for his paper "Reconstruction of Runtime Software Architecture for Object-Oriented Systems." Award: “The 30th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing - Student Research Competition program (Microsoft Research Sponsored)” Advisor: Professor Sungwon Kang Congratulations!

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  • 2014 Seoul Research Paper Award

    At the 2014 Seoul Conference for Research using Public Data, the following paper from our department won third place in the Best Paper competition: "Public Transportation Movement Pattern and Topic Analysis based on Topic Modeling" by Ph.D Student Hosung Park and Professor Sue Moon. Congratulations!

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  • Seung-Hwan Baek, MS student, and Prof. Min H. Kim ..

    Seung-Hwan Baek, MS student, and Prof. Min H. Kim presented their work on 3D stereo imaging and received the Songde Ma Best Application Paper Award and the Best Demo Award simulateneously at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2014). Congratulations on the best paper awards at ACCV 2014.

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  • Hancom-KAIST Research Center Opening Ceremony

    KAIST and Hancom have pledged to jointly collaborate in research and development of innovative technologies and solutions for software development. The opening ceremony for Hancom-KAIST Research Center was held on October 29th, 2014 in the CS building, with President Steve Kang of KAIST, President Sang Chul Kim of Hancom and Vice-president Hong Goo Lee of Hancom in attendance. KAIST and Hancom signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in April 2014 for research collaboration on software industry development. Since the signing of MOU, the two entities have held several important meetings to select five research projects and agreed to establish the Hancom-KAIST Research Center. In addition to carrying out the five projects, the Center plans to actively pursue new research projects. President Steve Kang of KAIST said in his congratulatory remarks, “KAIST will provide every support necessary to make the Research Center a role model in industry-research collaboration as well as a leading contributor to the software industry development in Korea.” He also spoke of his plans beyond joint research collaboration, by pledging to support “joint workshops and research efforts in future trend analysis, and talent exchange between KAIST and Hancom.” President Sang Chul Kim of Hancom said in his opening speech, “Through the newly established Research Center, Hancom and KAIST will collaborate closely and produce great synergetic effects in research and development.” Furthermore, he expressed his determination to, “make the Hancom-KAIST Research Center a ‘cradle of innovative software technologies’ and thus increase the competitiveness of software industry in Korea.”

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  • Francisco Rojas, PhD student, received the Disting..

    KAIST Computer Science Ph.D. Student Francisco Arturo Rojas (http://mind.kaist.ac.kr/Francis) (age 32) who is advised by Professor Hyun S. Yang (http://mind.kaist.ac.kr/professor.php) since the spring of 2010 received the Distinguished Paper Award at the international CyberWorlds 2014 (http://www.cw2014.unican.es) conference which took place at the royal Magdalena Palace in Santander, Spain in October 6-8. He presented two full papers, and the paper that won the award was titled “Safe Navigation of Pedestrians in Social Groups in a Virtual Urban Environment”, which was additionally co-authored by the founder of PsyTech LLC (http://psychologicaltechnologies.com), Fernando Tarnogol, a licensed psychologist who with a hired team of developers created the city virtual environment with vehicular traffic for which the crowd simulation research work was applied. The crowd simulation featured in this paper is the most up-to-date extension of ongoing two-year research work at the Artificial Intelligence and Media Lab (http://mind.kaist.ac.kr/crowdsimulation.php) of KAIST in making non-playable virtual characters mimic how real people move together in real life in social formations, with previous versions published at conferences such as Computer Graphics International (CGI 2014) (http://rp-www.cs.usyd.edu.au/∼cgi14/program/papersessions.php) in Sydney, Virtual Reality Continuum and Its Applications in Industry (ACM SIGGRAPH VRCAI 2013) (http://www2.mae.cuhk.edu.hk/∼vrcai2013/program.html) in Hong Kong, and Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2013) (http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/∼casa2013/?p=schedulespeakers) in Istanbul. The crowd simulation realism results were positively evaluated by many individuals via the original Oculus Rift headset for developers. Furthermore, the virtual reality application itself for which the research is applied, called PHOBOS (http://phobos.psychologicaltechnologies.com), is actually meant to be a professional exposure therapy tool to be used by doctors for the treatment of many patients’ common phobias and anxiety disorders, such as fear of heights, flying, public speaking, being confined in closed or small spaces, crowds, and spiders, among others. Since October 7 there has been a crowd funding campaign by PsyTech LLC at INDIEGOGO (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/phobos-anxiety-management-vr-platform) in order to continue development of the product which is currently in its early stages. So far the campaign has generated over $1300 for which Francisco himself is actually a stakeholder given his major research contribution to the project. The funding campaign will close on November 25 this year.

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  • SGLab and Boeing (USA) Sign Research Collaboration..

    The Scalable Graphics Lab (SGLab) led by Professor Sungeui Yoon signed a collaboration agreement with Boeing for joint research on massive model rendering. This research collaboration is supported by a total $375K fund for two years. For more information, visit: http://sglab.kaist.ac.kr/T-ReX/

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  • [Alumni] Dr. Sun-Hwa Hahn Appointed as the New Pre..

    Dr. Sun-Hwa Hahn has been appointed as the new president of KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) on September 12, 2014. Dr. Hahn holds Bachelor of Science degrees in chemical engineering from Hanyang University and information engineering from SungKyunKwan University. After receiving her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the KAIST Computer Science department, she began working at KISTI in 1997 and served as the director of Knowledge Support Center and Information and SW Research Center. Starting January 2013, she has also held important leadership roles in the Association of Korean Woman Scientists & Engineers and Promotion Proclamation of the Citizens' Coalition for Scientific Society. We expect more success from her new role as the president of KISTI!

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  • Makao Talk: Undergraduate Student Spotlight

    Donghwan Kim, Taesoon Jang, and Cheolho Jeon are the members of the team that placed first in the Kakao-KAIST Hackathon. 1) How did you get to join the Computer Science (CS) department? Taesoon: I had my first programming experience after I came to KAIST and kept programming for fun. When it came time for me to declare my major, I chose CS over chemistry, mainly because I really enjoyed the CS101 course and the CS department info session. Cheolho: I also had my first programming experience after I came to KAIST. In choosing my major, I knew I wanted to learn something that will be useful in the future and chose CS. Donghwan: I had originally intended to major in electrical engineering, but I changed my mind and chose CS because I enjoyed programming. I like the logical thinking process involved in programming and seeing the end result in an executable program. 2) What was your academic path like up until joining the CS department? Cheolho: I have an academic path that is different from most people here at KAIST. I attended junior high and high school in China and came here in the Spring of 2013. I remember I had a bit of hard time as a freshman while adjusting in the new setting. Taesoon: I graduated from a science high school in two years, which is an academic path commonly found among my peers here at KAIST. Donghwan: I graduated from Jang Young-Sil Science High School, which is where I first learned programming. 3) What was your childhood dream? What are you doing now to achieve that dream? Taesoon: When I was really young, I wanted to become a scientist. After I grew older, I wanted to become an entrepreneur, retire early, and then explore the world. I gained some entrepreneurship experience while taking the last three semesters off, and I would like to try it again in the near future. Donghwan: When I was young, I wanted to succeed, make a lot of money, and gain respect for my work. Now, instead of that kind of success, I want to do work that I can enjoy while collaborating with my friends. Cheolho: My dream was to have fun in life while helping to make the world a better place to live. I am having fun in life now and I expect it will be so in the future. I believe there are many ways to make the world a better place from where I am, such as doing research and creating a useful service. 4) What are your strengths? Taesoon: I work with a can-do spirit rather than fear of failure. Even if I do not know something well in the beginning, I have learned that confidence always leads to better end results. Cheolho: I think my passionate attitude about work is my strongest point. I am passionately driven to complete any project that I started, though the end result sometimes turns out to be rather unexpected. Donghwan: My strongest point is the ability to block out all the outside noise and sharply focus only on my work. 5) What are you passionately working on in the field of computer science these days? Cheolho: I am working on building a strong foundation of CS knowledge by studying hard and working with other CS people. Taesoon: I would like to get to know people of various backgrounds in our department, because they can become not only my friends but also coworkers someday! Donghwan: I am constantly searching for what I want for my professional career. I try to participate in many different activities, and I am doing an internship this semester. 6) What values and future prospects do you see in your current work? Taesoon: The interaction I get with different people in the CS department will prove to be valuable in the future. They are all very intelligent and highly likely to succeed, so I look forward to working with them after college. Donghwan: My current internship is a great opportunity to explore my future career paths. Although I cannot measure its exact value, I am content and enjoying the internship as it is. Cheolho: The value of my current work will depend on how well I get it done right now. Also, networking with a lot of CS people will prove valuable in my future life as well as career. 7) What were your happiest and most disappointing moments, respectively, in the CS department? Donghwan: My happiest moment was when the project I worked on all night finally produced successful results. Any CS student can probably related to this moment of joy. My most disappointing moment was when I felt that course materials were too difficult even after trying hard to follow them. Taesoon: I personally cannot think of the most disappointing moment. My happiest moment was when my ideas got accepted by others during a project brainstorming session. Cheolho: My most disappointing moment was when the PA I worked for days failed. It consumed a lot of time and ruined the score in the end. I have had many happy moments so far, and the best one was successfully developing an application during Kakao-KAIST Hackathon. 8) What do you think is the best thing about studying computer science? Taesoon: With even just a small bit of knowledge, there are so many ways to apply it and make a difference. Cheolho: I think the ubiquitous nature of computing is the best thing – I will never go hungry as long as I have a laptop to work with. Donghwan: CS is attractive because it has technologies with potentials to make the world a better place. It is much more accessible than other engineering disciplines, such as electrical engineering and bioengineering. By studying CS, one gains access to the power to change the world in a positive way. 9) What would you like to say to those interested in joining the CS department? Donghwan: As Eric Schmidt once said, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.” Cheolho: Mmm… CS is really fun. It doesn’t have to be a painful subject if you manage it well. I did not have any CS knowledge before entering KAIST, but I am doing fine now. The initial learning curve is not too high, so don’t be afraid to try! Taesoon: Many people mistakenly assume that studying CS takes some special skills and give up before trying it out. If you enjoyed CS101, you should consider joining the CS department. I believe genuine interest in the subject is more important than special skills. 10) What are your future plans? Taesoon: After graduating, I would like to get a job abroad or in Korea, become an entrepreneur, or go to graduate school. Cheolho: I will go to graduate school or work in the industry. Until then, I would like to learn and experience as much as I can here at KAIST. Donghwan: I will fulfill the military service requirement by going to graduate school or working in the industry. Afterwards, I would like to find career that will allow me to make a positive difference in the world.

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  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

    [Prof. Kee-­Eung Kim] The ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI), which is in essence building intelligent systems, requires computational and mathematical frameworks for intelligent behaviors. At the core of these frameworks lies the principle of rationality, and the decision theory provides a classical but effective tool for building intelligent systems as well as understanding the behavior of humans and animals. My research group at KAIST has been devoted to designing and developing decision-theoretic representations and algorithms for AI. Research Results My research group is working on representations and algorithms for decision theoretic planning problems, including large scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs). Decision theory is one of the most important approaches to understanding and implementing the rational and intelligent behavior. 1. MDPs and POMDPs The classical MDP/POMDP representation has been a useful tool for modeling intelligent behaviors for decades. However, we often encounter the need to extend the standard representation to effectively capture real-world problems. For example, how can we naturally specify the constraints on the properties of desired solutions, or handle the uncertainty in the parameters of the model? As we extend the standard model, how can we address the computational challenges in designing efficient algorithms? We have addressed some of these theoretical issues and presented at top-tier AI conferences. 2. Machine learning of behavioral data The standard way of machine learning for the intelligent behavior is the reinforcement learning (RL). However, the standard setting in RL algorithms assumes prescribed reward functions, which is not an easy task to specify them in practice. Inferring the reward function from the behavior data is referred to as the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), and its significance has emerged from the connection among RL and other disciplines such as neurophysiology, behavioral neuroscience, and economics. IRL is an important problem for understanding human and animal behaviors, and we have presented our algorithms at a top-tier machine learning conference and journal. 3. Applications Besides theoretical research on representations and algorithms, our group also worked on applications to demonstrate the usefulness of the decision-theoretic AI approach. Our work on applications include spoken dialogue systems and brain-computer interface systems. Awards 1. 2nd place in the POMDP track of the International Probabilistic Planning Competition (IPPC), 2011 2. Best poster award at the Pacific-Rim Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI), 2010 References Published papers 1. Jaedeug Choi and Kee-Eung Kim,“MAP Inference for Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning”In: Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2011). [Accepted] 2. Jaeyoung Park, Kee-Eung Kim, and Yoon-Kyu Song,“A POMDP-based Optimal Control of P300-based Brain-Computer Interfaces”In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) NECTAR Track. 2011. [8th Korean AAAI paper] 3. Dongho Kim, Jaesong Lee, Kee-Eung Kim, and Pascal Poupart,“Point-Based Value Iteration for Constrained POMDPs”In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). 2011. [5th Korean IJCAI paper] 4. Eunsoo Oh and Kee-Eung Kim,“A Geometric Traversal Algorithm for Reward-Uncertain MDPs”In: Proceedings of the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). 2011. [1st Korean UAI paper] 5. Pascal Poupart, Kee-Eung Kim, and Dongho Kim,“Closing the Gap: Towards Provably Optimal POMDP Solutions”In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). 2011. [1st Korean ICAPS paper] 6. Jaedeug Choi and Kee-Eung Kim,“Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Partially Observable Environments”Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 12. 2011. [2nd Korean JMLR paper] 7. Dongho Kim, Jin Hyung Kim, and Kee-Eung Kim,“Robust Performance Evaluation of POMDP-Based Dialogue Systems”IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), 19(4). 2011. 8. Youngwook Kim and Kee-Eung Kim,“Point-Based Bounded Policy Iteration for Decentralized POMDPs”In: Proceedings of Pacific-Rim Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) / Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 6230. 2010. [Best poster award] 9. Jaeyoung Park, Kee-Eung Kim, and Sungho Jo,“A POMDP Approach to P300-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces”In: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). 2010. 10. U.S. Patent Application 20110152710,“Adaptive Brain-Computer Interface Device”

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  • Developing a hyperspectral 3D imaging system and s..

    [Prof. Min H. Kim] 3D imaging techniques have been broadly used in manufacturing, entertainment and military industries. However, current 3D imaging systems have been limited to capturing and representing only trichromatic 3D objects. This research project extends the spectral dimension of 3D imaging techniques beyond the trichromatic spectrum. It is the first approach to build a complete 3D scanning system that measures the hyperspectral reflectance of solid objects. This research project includes the design and building of a 3D imaging system, the development of 3D imaging algorithms, and several 3D software applications to visualize such hyperspectral 3D image data. The research outcome of this project could be broadly adapted to physically meaningful measurements of hyperspectral material appearance of 3D solid objects in natural science and bio-medical engineering. Schematic overview of the 3D imaging spectroscopy system (ACM Trans. on Graphics, 31(4), 38:1-11, SIGGRAPH 2012) Research Funding ㆍ This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, Samsung Electronics and Microsoft Research Asia additionally. Research Results ㆍ This imaging system was introduced for the first time in ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2012, the top journal in computer graphics. The associated visualization software application was published in ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2014 such that this work was received a best paper award in 2012 at the International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST 2012). References ㆍ M. H. Kim, T. A. Harvey ,D. S. Kittle, H. Rushmeier, J. Dorsey, R. O. Prum, D. J. Brady (2012), "3D Imaging Spectroscopy for Measuring Hyperspectral Patterns on Solid Objects," ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2012), 31(4), July 2012, pp. 38:1-11 (IF=3.361) ㆍ M. H. Kim, H. Rushmeier, J. ffrench, I. Passeri, D. Tidmarsh (2014), "Hyper3D: 3D Graphics Software for Examining Cultural Artifacts," ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 7(3), February, pp. 1:1-19

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  • Analysis on Media Characteristics of Twitter

    [Prof. Sue Bok Moon] Via quantitative analysis with the not-sampled, but complete data, we show media-like characteristics of Twitter. Online communication has emerged as a new form of media, and our work is one of the first to demonstrate a quantitative approach for new media research. Research Results Online Social Network (OSN) services are creating a sea of new products and services based on the social networks. OSN services, such as Facebook and Twitter, threaten the established ones, such as Microsoft, Google and Apple. Twitter, a microblogging service, stands out from other OSN services in that its relations are directional and most user profiles and tweets are public. For three months from June 2009, we collected profiles of all Twitter users. Our analysis shows that Twitter has characteristics of not only a social network but also of media. The reciprocity typically over 80% in social networks is low (less than 50%). Most tweets are of news nature. Retweets expand readership by 100 or more easily. ※Excellency and Expected effects No further explanation is necessary for the influential power of Twitter, as demonstrated in the recent Seoul mayor election. However, in 2009 when we started our research on Twitter, domestic awareness was low and nobody could have imagined the explosive power in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) situations this spring. Our paper, “What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?” published in the World-Wide Web (WWW) conference on April 2010, investigates social phenomena via Twitter and provides statistical approaches on the complete data of Twitter. Our data crawling and analysis methodologies have become a de-facto standard in follow-up research. The Library of Congress in US has decided to archive the entire Twitter data, thus acknowledging the historic significance of massive-scale communication records among hundreds of million users for the first time in human history. Twitter provides an epoch-making data that allows people to collect information and observe its diffusion in an unprecedentedly massive scale and is changing the face of research methodologies in computer science, sociology, politics, business administration, cognitive science and more. Our paper, published in the WWW conference in 2010, is cited more than 2000 times (via Google Scholar) as of July 2014 and we expect the number to increase even more in the coming years. This work has been covered by domestic and foreign press such as ChosunIlbo, HankookIlbo, MIT Technology Review Blog, ReadWriteWeb, the Observer, PC World, Mashable Op-Ed. Computer science graduate courses at Georgia Institute of Technology, UC Santa Barbara and Cornell have included our paper in their lecture material. Non-computer science departments, such as MIT Business School, Bowdoin College sociology department, and the University of California at San Diego Visual Arts Department have also included our work. From 2009 I have given more than 10 invited talks on this paper, including Boston Univ., Northwestern Univ., UC Santa Barbara, Microsoft Research Bangalore, Microsoft Research Redmond, Duke Univ., North Carolina State Univ. This work provides data collection and analysis methodologies for new media studies and falls to the category of fundamental science. It is hard to file for a patent or apply immediate productization from this work but this work reveals basic characteristics of new media, of which knowledge is imperative to designing derivative products or services. Our investigation of human society via online service provides a new direction for interdisciplinary research between computer science, humanities, and social sciences. KAIST established the Web Science and Technology division under the World-Class University program sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, for this kind of interdisciplinary research. In Korea with its world-best high-speed Internet infrastructure and less-than-1% illiteracy and highly educated work-force, interdisciplinary research could be the guiding light to take our IT industry to the next level. We hope our social network of interdisciplinary collaborators initiated by this Twitter research continues to expand and become a catalyst for explosive growth in our academic excellence. Reference Published papers 1. Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hyunwoo Chun, Sue Moon,“What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?” Proceedings of the World-Wide Web, April 2010, Raleigh, North Carolina.(Acceptance rate: 14% , Citation: 313) Funding Sources 1. Collect, Analyze and Share for Future Internet : High-Precision Measurement and Analysis Research, 2008.3.1.∼2013.2.28., MKE

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  • Scalable Big Graph Mining

    [Prof. U Kang] Scalable big graph mining using distributed systems opens new opportunities for the discovery of interesting patterns and anomalies on very large graphs which could not be analyzed before. Article: Graphs are ubiquitous: computer networks, social networks, mobile call networks, biological networks, citation networks, protein regulation networks, and the World Wide Web, to name a few. Spurred by the lower cost of disk storage, the success of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) and Web 2.0 applications, and the high availability of data sources, graph data are being generated at an unparalleled rate. They are now measured in terabytes and heading toward petabytes, with more than billions of nodes and edges. Mining such big graphs helps us find patterns and anomalies which lead to many interesting applications including fraud detection, cyber security, social network analysis, etc. The research team at Prof. U Kang in Department of Computer Science is working on scalable big graph mining which includes two components: scalable algorithms and discoveries on real world graphs. Scalable Algorithms. Traditional graph algorithms assume the input graph fits in the memory or disks of a single machine. However, the recent growth of the sizes in graphs violates this assumption. Since single machine algorithms are not tractable for handling big graphs, the research team at Prof. U Kang is working on designing and developing scalable algorithms and distributed platforms for mining and managing big graphs. Prof. U Kang is the main author of the award-winning Pegasus graph mining software which includes various large scale graph mining algorithms including PageRank, Random Walk with Restart (RWR), diameter estimation, connected components, eigensolver, and tensor analysis. Discoveries on Real World Graphs. The developed scalable algorithms lead to the analysis of large real world graphs, and interesting discoveries of patterns and anomalies which could not be found before. One of the most interesting discoveries is the seven-degrees of separation in one of the largest publicly available Web graphs with ∼7 billion edges. The discovery suggests that the so-called 'small world' phenomenon exists in the Web, and the distance between any two Web pages is much smaller than people's expectations. Another interesting discovery is the existence of suspicious adult advertisers in the Twitter who-follows-whom social network at 2009 with 3 billion edges. In the scatter plot of degree vs. triangles of Twitter accounts, some famous U.S. politicians have mildly connected followers, while adult advertisers have tightly connected followers, creating many triangles. The reason is that adult accounts are often from the same provider, and the accounts follow each other to boost their rankings, thereby creating many cliques containing triangles. Image caption: Anomaly detection in graph: the degree vs. triangles in the Twitter who-follows-whom social network at 2009. Some famous U.S. politicians have mildly connected followers, while adult advertisers have tightly connected followers, creating many triangles. The reason is that adult accounts are often from the same provider, and the accounts follow each other to boost their rankings, thereby creating many cliques containing triangles. [U KANG AND CHRISTOS FALOUTSOS, BIG GRAPH MINING: ALGORITHMS AND DISCOVERIES, SIGKDD EXPLORATION VOLUME 14 ISSUE 2, DECEMBER 2012.

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  • Smartphone-based Interaction Sensing to Innovate O..

    [Prof. Junehwa Song] Advancing our smartphones as conversational interaction sensing platforms to promote social health in everyday life Article: A team of researchers in Dept. of Computer Science, KAIST are leading new mobile initiatives to build social context platforms and create life-immersive social services. The key inspiration is to advance our commodity mobile devices such as smartphones towards a face-to-face social gateway – to acquire the real-time social contexts and create proactive services naturally overlaid on our everyday face-to-face social lives. Why social? Because it is an integral basis which constitutes many of our daily activities, such as family life, team-oriented works, hanging out with friends, and so on. They believe that stretching out for diverse social contexts around the user will realize the foundation of future mobile systems which achieve holistic understanding on the user’s need and useful life-immersive services. The quest begins with a question, “What would be the primitive context in our face-to-face social interaction?” As the initial and natural step, the research team focused on conversation, which would be the most prevalent tool to communicate with people just in front of us. A number of new technical challenges arises to recognize delicate conversational contexts with commodity mobile devices. In 2013, they reached the first milestone, SocioPhone, a mobile face-to-face interaction platform with highlights meta-linguistic contexts in conversations. SocioPhone is described in a paper published in ACM MobiSys 20131 (International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services) by a team of a KAIST graduate Youngki Lee, who is now an assistant professor of Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU), and 8 others. SocioPhone abstracts on-going conversations as a sequence of turns and pauses. SocioPhone provides applications with a set of intuitive APIs to monitor rich meta-linguistic context on the fly, without requiring computation-intensive semantic inference on conversation contents. At its core, the SocioPhone runtime monitors conversational turn-centric contexts in a highly-efficient and precise manner based on a new socially-leveraged collaborative sensing scheme. In addition to the paper publication, a live demonstration of SocioPhone won the Best Demonstration Award in ACM HotMobile 20132 (International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications), which was conducted by a KAIST graduate student Chulhong Min and 14 others. Continuing the efforts, the research team is now creating compelling applications which are indispensable for a new platform to find its unique values. Notably, they proposed TalkBetter, a prominent initiative for everyday clinical care applications. The paper describing TalkBetter has won the Best Paper Award in ACM CSCW 20143 (International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing), which was authored by an interdisciplinary team of a KAIST graduate Inseok Hwang who is now a research assistant professor of Center for Mobile SW Platform in KAIST, Prof. Dongsun Yim in Dept. of Communication Disorders, Ewha Womans University, and 5 others. They introduced a mobile in-situ intervention service to expedite everyday family-driven care for children with speech impediments. With close collaboration with the speech-language pathologists and the patients regularly taking speech-language care, TalkBetter has been designed and developed as an integrated therapeutic service which facilitates the parents to acquire clinically desirable conversation habits throughout natural conversations, not only depending on simple a-priori prescription as it has been done thus far. Today, many people observe growing concerns about the anti-social effects of smartphones, attempting to suppress the smartphone use in face-to-face social situations. These researches advocate an antithesis of such technophobic skepticisms. They are pursuing the pro-social potential of pervasive mobile devices around us, and realizing the first-of-its-kind mobile systems to enhance our everyday social life experience. These researches were supported by National Research Foundation funded by Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (MSIP) and IT R&D Program of MSIP/KEIT of the Korean Government. 1. Lee, Y., Min, C., Hwang, C., Lee, J., Hwang, I., Ju, Y., Yoo, C., Moon, M., Lee, U., Song, J. SocioPhone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion. ACM MobiSys 2013, Taipei, Taiwan, June 2013. 2. Min, C., Hwang, I., Lee, J., Hwang, C., Yoo, C., Moon, M., Park, T., Lee, C., Lee, H., Kim, Y., Ju, Y., Lee, Y., Lee, U., Song, J. Demo: Bringing In-situ Awareness to Mobile Systems: Everyday Interaction Monitoring and Its Applications. ACM HotMobile 2013 (Demo), Jekyll Island, GA, USA, February 2013. 3. Hwang, I., Yoo, C., Hwang, C., Yim, D., Lee, Y., Min, C., Kim, J., Song, J. TalkBetter: Family-driven Mobile Intervention Care for Children with Language Delay. ACM CSCW 2014, Baltimore, MD, USA, February 2014. Image caption: Real-time meta-linguistic monitoring and feedback by the smartphone for the on-going conversation between the mother and her son. [PHOTO COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS] Image caption: Face-to-face conversation situations and socially-leveraged collaborative sensing scheme for conversational turn monitoring [PHOTO COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS]

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  • Virtual Reality-based Dental Training Simulator

    [Prof. Jinah Park] Dental caries and calculus are prevalent diseases among people. For better treatment of these diseases, dental students need to receive training efficiently and their skills must be assessed by standardized methods. Our research allows students to assess their skill based on the training results and provide an effective practice to master their skills. A novel collision model is developed to deal with various interactions between different shaped instruments and the oral cavity. The instrument is represented by a distance field and a set of points, and the tooth is represented as a distance field. The distance field of the tooth is updated by tracing the plastic deformation of tooth while the collision detection and the reflected force are efficiently computed from the distance field of the tooth and the set of points. Research Results 1. A collision model for real-time simulation of tooth preparation Since instruments for tooth cutting are small and sharp compared to the tooth, it is necessary to not only elaborate but also refine the collision model that handles the plastic deformation of the tooth caused by cutting instruments. To address this issue, we propose a real-time collision model in which the tooth is represented as a volume model with a distance field. This volume model is shared by not only a procedure to visualize the shape deformation of the tooth but also a procedure to detect collision and compute feedback force for haptic rendering. Our method can handle more than 10,000 volume elements within 1kHz, there is no limit on the shape of the instruments. 2. Adhesion attenuation model for dental calculus removal In contrast to the hand scaling, the ultrasonic scaling delivers ultrasonic wave energy to the dental calculus to remove it by reducing the adhesion between dental calculus and tooth surface. To simulate this characteristic, we propose an adhesion attenuation model that reduces the dental calculus adhesion by the amount of wave energy inversely proportional to the distance squared from collided voxel. Our method enables the users to use the ultrasonic scaler in the advisable way. 3. VR-based dental simulator Dental simulation ran on a personal computer with Core2Duo 3GHz central processing unit, NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 graphics card, and 4 GB Ram. A Phantom Desktop was used to display the haptic feedback. Moreover, an immersive workbench, SenseGraphics Display 300, was used to align the hand-eye coordination. Our simulator provides different training scenarios: impacted wisdom tooth surgery, dental cavity preparation, ultrasonic scaling as shown in the Figure 1-3. Excellency and Expected effects Most of the previously developed dental simulations consider only a spherically shaped tool due to its simplicity in collision detection. Our collision model can handle any arbitrarily shaped instruments with multiple contacts between the instrument and the tooth. Moreover, synchronization between a visual model and a collision model is not required because our method resolves volume cut, multiple contacts, and feedback force within a haptic rate. The collision model can be applied to not only a bone surgery simulation but also a virtual sculpting simulation.

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  • Internet of things and system software

    [Prof. Dae Young Kim] The term Internet of Things was firstly introduced in 1999 by Kevin Ashton at the Auto-ID Labs, MIT, which is the primary research partner of GS1. GS1 is a global organization which provides various types of codes such as bar code, RFID code, QR code for thing identification, and also standardizing system infrastructure for global business and application. Among seven Auto-ID Labs (MIT, Cambridge, ETH Zurich, Keio, Fudan, Adelaide, KAIST) over the world, Auto-ID Lab, KAIST have studied in IoT field since 2002, with the RFID and wireless sensor network technology. And since 2005, we started to develop various IoT technologies that are specialized to GS1 standard. We are currently working on following projects; Oliot (GS1 based IoT Infrastructure Platform), SNAIL (6LoWPAN based IoT Connectivity Platform), SeaHaven (Visual Sensor Network Cloud Platform), IoT-App Ecosystem (Ecosystem for Mobile Versatile Applications), GPGPU HPC Cloud (Cloud Computing for HPC with GPGPU). [Research Results] The IoT is the vision that aims to give every day object virtual personality. The rationale behind this is to let them have global identification, computation and communication capabilities. That is, our everyday things become intelligent and are able to provide us with any information about themselves. As a result, vast opportunities to create entirely new dimension of services appear. In this regard, we have developed the following five technologies to realize the IoT vision. (1) SNAIL: We enabled communication among things over Internet to achieve 6LoWPAN IoT network. SNAIL (Sensor Network for an All-IP World) is a solution for IoT network, which is a tiny IPv6-based sensor networking platform including a complete architecture of a lightweight TCP/IP stack supporting IPv6 adaptation, ad-hoc routing, header compression, and bootstrapping as well as four important technologies, mobility, web enablement, time synchronization, and security. (2) Oliot: Oliot is aiming an international standard based IoT Infrastructure Platform, by extending the code system of GS1 and their standard architecture to support various IoT connectivity and protocols such as bar code, RFID, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, etc. Oliot also aims a complete implementation of GS1/EPCglobal standard. (3) IoT-App Ecosystem: IoT-App Ecosystem is a new ecosystem for mobile software, which enables easier interaction between mobile application and various smart things. This is currently being implemented for Android and supports current Android development environment. (4) SeaHaven: SeaHaven is a portable and secure multi-tenant visual sensor networks cloud platform which covers visual sensor node operating systems, visual sensor streaming service, visual big data processing service, and user applications. The major goal of this project is to make the machine understand the context of the scene by leveraging visual sensors all over the world which are very beyond human’ visual sensory. (5) GPGPU HPC Cloud: This project is about Cloud computing for HPC with general purpose graphical processing unit (GPGPU). Using GPGPU on Cloud will reduce cost and power usage than using only CPUs. We implemented platform with OpenStack, KVM, and API forwarding technique. [Excellency and Expected effects] (1) SNAIL: We make an effort to support secure, dynamic, global, and easy access to everyday objects using IPv6 address. Our IoT platform SNAIL is evaluated as a promising IoT platform and new version SNAIL 2.0 will come out soon. (2) Oliot: The entire source code was opened to public and is designated to be utilized on various project such as EU IoT6 Smart Building Project, KAIST Dr. M Project, c-ITRC Food Safety System, Stanford Civil Engineering Project, Korea University Hospital Project, and Smart Consumer Electronics. The roadmap and vision of Oliot project is described in oliot.org. (3) IoT-App Ecosystem: With this work, mobile application developers can more easily implement applications which interacts with pervasive smart things. Also, it aids the developers to publish their business logic to customers. (4) SeaHaven: To make the machine understand the context of an event is a quite challenging job to handle. Variety and sparse distribution of sensors must be the most helping key in resolving this issue. SeaHaven provides a universal interface for sensors to cover variety and heterogeneity of sensor devices and a very scalable service architecture to easily scale out the system over the cloud infrastructure. (5) GPGPU HPC Cloud: To use GPGPU on Cloud, previous approach only supports one to one mapping virtual machine and GPGPU. With API forwarding technique and Kepler architecture GPGPU, our platform supports scalable use of GPUs. And with efficient GPU resource scheduling algorithms, our platform can maximize resource utilization while providing SLA for HPC users.

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  • Investigating Reliable Computing Systems in Nano-s..

    [Prof. Soontae Kim] With technology scaling, feature sizes, and supply and sub-threshold voltages are decreasing for high performance, high transistor density, and low power consumption. At the same time, microprocessors and memory systems are integrating more transistors to extract more performance. Unfortunately, these trends make computing systems more susceptible to various errors. Transient errors occur when energetic neutrons coming from deep space and alpha particles from packaging materials hit transistors, which change the state of memory bits or the output of combinational logic temporarily. In addition, permanent errors due to process variations and wear-out in interconnect and transistors increase over time, which in turn decrease yield and lifetime of the computing systems. Therefore, it is essential to provide reliable computing on top of unreliable systems for the continued success of computing. We investigate low-cost processor architectures, memory systems and software to combat against those various errors in nano-scale era. [Research Highlight] Access-time Variation Insensitive Level-1 Caches [1] Ever-scaling process technology increases variations in transistors. The process variations cause large fluctuations in the access times of SRAM cells. Caches made of those SRAM cells cannot be accessed within the target clock cycle time, which reduces yield of processors. To combat these access time failures in caches, many schemes have been proposed, which are, however, limited in their coverage and do not scale well at high failure rates. We proposed a new level-1 cache architecture (AVICA) employing asymmetric pipelining and pseudo multi-banking. Asymmetric pipelining eliminates all access time failures in L1 caches. Pseudo multi-banking minimizes the performance impact of asymmetric pipelining. For further performance improvement, architectural techniques were proposed. [Reference] 1. Seokin Hong and Soontae Kim. AVICA: An Access-time Variation Insensitive L1 Cache Architecture. Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE’13), March 18∼22, 2013, Grenoble, France (Best Paper Award).

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  • OncoSearch: A web tool that searches biomedical li..

    [Prof. Jong Cheol Park] OncoSearch (http://oncosearch.biopathway.org) is a web tool that allows the user to query into biomedical literature for information on cancer-related genes and shows the results for further insights into oncogenesis, with an aim to catalyze and accelerate the ongoing cancer research. [Article] Automatic identification of gene-cancer relations from a very large volume of biomedical text is an important task for cancer research since changes in genes are known to be the main cause of oncogenesis and a huge amount of information on such genes is archived in biomedical literature databases. To identify such relations, it is essential to understand, as much as possible, how a gene affects a cancer and to distinguish oncogenes (genes that cause cancers), tumor suppressor genes (genes that protect cells from cancers), and biomarkers (genes that indicate normal or cancerous states) since this will speed up the development of treatment and diagnosis methods for cancer. Although genes may sometimes be explicitly claimed as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes in the biomedical text, it is more often the case that information on gene-cancer relations is conveyed only implicitly with detailed descriptions about gene and cancer properties. Consider the example of the sentence below. WWOX overexpression induced apoptosis and suppressed prostate cancer growth in vitro and in vivo [PMID:17704139]. While the gene WWOX is a well-known tumor suppressor, the sentence above does not contain an explicit reference to the gene as such. Instead, the sentence gives information that helps to classify the gene WWOX as a tumor suppressor of prostate cancer through the following inference: 1) WWOX expression level is increased, 2) prostate cancer regresses when WWOX expression increases, and 3) there is causality between the change in WWOX and the change in prostate cancer. By combining the three pieces of information above, one may classify the gene WWOX as a tumor suppressor gene. Although a single sentence with such implicit information may not provide enough evidence to confirm a particular gene's class, collecting a large amount of such information in the literature would certainly help to substantiate such a conclusion. Prof. Jong C. Park’s research team at KAIST developed OncoSearch, a web tool that allows the user to query into the biomedical literature for free-text information on cancer-related genes and provides the results for further insights into oncogenesis, or the process by which normal cells are transformed into cancer cells. In particular, OncoSearch can classify genes into either oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, or biomarkers by taking into account implicit information as well as explicit information on their roles. The tool characterizes gene-cancer relations described in biomedical text with 1) how a gene changes, 2) how a cancer changes, and 3) the causality between the gene and the cancer, and the tool infers the respective roles of genes in cancers. Through this classification, the research team showed that the tool can correctly pick out oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes already registered as such in biology databases. The research team also showed that only small portions, or 6.87% and 3.76%, respectively, of the oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes in one of the de facto standard gene databases, or UniProtKB, are registered in the list of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes published by Vogelstein and colleagues (Science, 2013). This indicates either 1) that the process of identifying new oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes is still at an early stage or 2) that the exact definitions of oncogene and tumor suppressor gene are highly dependent upon each biology database. OncoSearch is, thus, expected to catalyze much further research in oncology since the tool can collect and infer information about novel oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, and biomarkers from the rapidly growing body of the literature that does not necessarily contain explicit expressions such as oncogene and tumor suppressor gene.

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  • High-physicality touch interfaces

    [Prof. Geehyuk Lee] Touch interfaces are now a de facto standard for information appliances. They enabled more direct and natural interaction than traditional computer interfaces, but are still in their early stage as the types of operations are quite limited compared with diverse surface operations that we perform in the real world. The limitations of the current touch interfaces stem mainly from their inability to discriminate touches of different degrees, for example, hover, light touch and heavy touch. We are interested in new possibilities that may be enabled when touch surfaces become more physically sensitive, for instance, when they can sense the approach or the pressure of the fingers as well as their touch. We are conducting a series of interaction design studies with high-fidelity prototyping, and are publishing some of early results in leading HCI conferences. Research Results Touch with Hover We developed a world-best class optical hover tracking touchpad technology and are exploring the potential of using it. Using this technology, we can provide a touch-screen-like interaction in the TV environment. For instance, the shadow of the user's fingers touches the screen, presses a button, and flicks a cover-flow-like list, while the fingers stay and move on a touchpad. In order to explore this concept, we developed a hover-tracking optical touchpad, and designed a TV application to demonstrate possible new interaction techniques. Through a prototyping study, we could correct some of our false expectations, and verify its potential as a viable option for a TV remote interface. (left) RemoteTouch concept and device, (right) Hover-tracking long touchpad Touch with Force The same finger movement on an object may be associated with different intentions depending on its normal and tangential forces. For instance, the same finger movement can be intended to turn a single page or to turn multiple pages, or to slide on a page, but a touch screen cannot differentiate these gestures. We solved this problem with a touch screen that can sense not only touch positions but also touch forces. We implemented a prototype device that can sense the normal and the tangential component of the forces on the screen, designed Force Gestures, which differ in terms of both touch movements and force patterns, and conducted an experiment to verify the feasibility of this approach. (left) example force gestures, (right) example multi-point tangential force interaction Excellency and Expected effects A complete report of our research on the RemoteTouch concept was presented at ACM CHI 2011 [C1]. The CHI paper soon attracted the attention of technology reporters and a news article about the paper appeared in DiscoveryNews [W1] and MSNBC.com [W2]. The optical hover-tracking technology was also implemented into form factors of a standard laptop touchpad and long shaped palm rest-length touchpad, and presented at ACM UIST 2011 [C2] and ACM CHI 2013 [C3], as a demo and a poster, respectively. The long touchpad was also introduced by American technology blogs, NewScientist Blog [W3] and Gizmodo [W4]. Regarding Force-sensing touch technology, a complete report is presented at ACM UIST 2011 [C4] and ACM CHI 2013 [C5], which is one of the most competitive venues for UI researchers. Published at ACM CHI and ACM UIST, the results of the current research were verified to be original and academically important. The research is also expected to have an impact on ICT industry since their main application targets are smart phones and smart TVs. After the introduction of iPhone, mobile phone manufacturers realized the importance of UI technologies and are experimenting with many new UI technologies to impress the market. High physicality touch screen or touchpad as demonstrated by our research results is certainly one of them. We were invited to present our research on touch interfaces by major companies such as LG and Samsung this year. We could also attract research funds from an industry source [F1] and a government source [F2] for the current research. The aforementioned news articles [W1, W2, W3] also reflect the public interests in the current research. References C1. Sangwon Choi, Jaehyun Han, Geehyuk Lee, Narae Lee, and Woohun Lee, RemoteTouch: Touch-Screen-like Interaction in the TV Viewing Environment, CHI 2011 (paper). C2. Sangwon Choi, Jaehyun Han, Sunjun Kim, Seongkook Heo, and Geehyuk Lee, ThickPad: A Hover-Tracking Touchpad for a Laptop, ACM UIST 2011 (demo). C3. Jiseong Gu, Seongkook Heo, Jaehyun Han, Sunjun Kim, and Geehyuk Lee, LongPad: a touchpad using the entire area below the keyboard of a laptop computer, ACM CHI 2013 (paper) C4. Seongkook Heo and Geehyuk Lee, Force gestures: augmenting touch screen gestures with normal and tangential forces, ACM UIST 2011 (paper). C5. Seongkook Heo and Geehyuk Lee, Indirect shear force estimation for multi-point shear force operations, ACM CHI 2013 (paper) W1. http://news.discovery.com/tech/shadow-remote- touchscreen-110519.html W2. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43095028 W3. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/01/trackpad-ignores-accidental-to.html?cmpid=RSS%7CNSNS%7C2012-GLOBAL%7Conline-news W4. http://gizmodo.com/5982160/intelligent-keyboard-wide-touchpad-is-smart-enough-to-ignore-your-palms Funding Sources 1. Implementation of USN Sensor Platform and Network Systems, Funded by National Research Laboratory (NRL) Program of NRF, 2007-current 2. u-Agriculture, Funded by ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) Program of MKE, 2007-current

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