Korea University ‘K-Hub’ Consortium Selected to Lead “AI Innovation Hub”

The Ministry of Science and ICT (Minister Hye-sook Lim) announced that the 'K-Hub Grand Consortium', supervised by Korea University, was finally selected as an institution to carry out the AI ​​Innovation Hub project.

The AI ​​Innovation Hub project has been carried out since May to build a national research system with world-class competitiveness by collecting AI research capabilities accumulated in domestic universities, companies, and research institutes, and by creating an open AI research environment.

A total of 215 institutions, including 57 domestic and foreign universities, 119 companies, and 18 research institutes, participates in the ‘K-Hub Grand Consortium’.

For K-Hub, 12 universities including Korea University will be divided into two groups to lead the research, and 14 domestic universities such as Kangwon University and Dongguk University, and 31 overseas universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) will cooperate.

In addition, 102 large, small and medium-sized venture companies in Korea, 17 overseas companies including Google and Facebook, 7 major domestic institutions such as ETRI, KIST, and KETI, and 11 overseas research institutes such as the Fraunhofer and Max Planck Institute will also cooperate for the project.

The K-Hub Grand Consortium will receive approximately 44.5 billion won in support over the next five years and will take a key role in strengthening national AI capabilities and nurturing human resources in sectors including ① advanced and challenging research in artificial intelligence ② creation of an open research environment ③ nurturing top-notch talent.

K-Hub's research groups set the main directions for the development of super-giant artificial intelligence to secure core technology and specialized AI research for each field, such as robots, drones, mobile, medical care, and energy, and each group will conduct research on detailed topics.

Moreover, a computing center with a scale of 50 petaflops (PF, capable of performing more than 1,000 trillion operations per second), which can be used by up to 1,000 people at the same time, will be built in order to create a research environment necessary for large-scale research projects and various computing infrastructures from companies such as KT and Naver will be linked for universities and companies participating in the consortium.

There will train human resources through artificial intelligence convergence courses for master’s and doctoral students in other majors within the university, credit exchange between universities, and AI convergence technology courses for incumbent employees in local businesses. Technological exchanges and the spread of research results will be promoted through colloquiums, seminars, industry-university cooperation, etc., and relevant information will be disclosed through an open sharing platform to all researchers interested in artificial intelligence.

“As most of the major researchers who lead the domestic AI field participate in the AI ​​Innovation Hub selected this time, it is expected that it will be able to play a pivotal role in raising the domestic AI capability to the next level,” said Kyung-sik Cho, 2nd Vice Minister of Science and ICT. "We will actively support the highest level of artificial intelligence research and talent development to get tangible results," he said.

Reported by Smart City Today