Professors JUNG Kyomin (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), PARK Hyungmin (Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) and LEE Won Bo (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering) selected as the first recipients of the ‘home run’ funding.

Seoul National University College of Engineering launched a new research fund, dubbed the"Home Run" Project, in hopes of achieving more groundbreaking research that can"hit a home run." Beginning in 2016, the initiative selects three SNU professors of engineering every year and supports each with ten years of funding worth 300 million won. After ten years, the project will be supporting 30 professors, which amounts to almost 9% of all College of Engineering professors. The project is to be funded by Dongbu Cultural Foundation.

The first three researchers to receive funding were professors JUNG Kyomin (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), PARK Hyungmin (Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) and LEE Won Bo (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering).

Professor Jung, who earned his PhD in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will investigate the Deep Learning technology used by Google's AlphaGo program."Current translation services provided by web portals such as Google are based on the frequency of sentence usage," explained Jung,"resulting in translations that are not very smooth." By analyzing the smallest sentence components through AI, the professor aims to develop a more accurate translation service.

Professor Park's research objective is to design energy-generating technology by studying the pattern of particles as they change with gas flow. At the moment, Korean power plants import technology from the U.S. or Europe, but Park hopes to invent original technology.

Professor Lee's research seeks to examine atomic, molecular-level chemical reaction models through computer simulations. The ultimate purpose of his research is to develop technology that improves production methods of medicine and metallic/plastic materials.

The College of Engineering revealed that it selected research proposals based on their long-term viability, choosing only those that showed the potential of developing into groundbreaking, globally competitive research. The criteria used to evaluate candidates did not include quantitative indices such as the number of their published works or citations.

Such standards are clearly different from those of most other research funds in Korea, the majority of which tend to last a maximum of three years and emphasize quantity over quality. Consequently, many researchers focus on topics that will lead to successful results in a short period of time. The success rate of researches funded by the government is 98%, but the reality is that nearly all of these studies are imitations or applications of previous successful researches, and therefore are not very innovative. This was the main reason behind SNU's decision to introduce the"Home Run" Project, as a long-term research fund that will provide researchers with the liberty to undertake challenging yet original projects without being pressed for short-term success.

"The Nobel Prize is awarded to scholars who demonstrate something that did not exist before, not to those publish a large number of papers," expressed Professor LEE Kunwoo, Dean of SNU College of Engineering."In the academia, only the 'home run' is remembered. This project is a challenge to produce 'home run' researchers."

Written by YOON Jiwon, SNU English Editor, jiwonyoon@snu.ac.kr
Reviewed by Professor Travis Smith, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, tlsmith@snu.ac.kr