Where does Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology fit into global human knowledge?
https://x.com/taejunkim_13/status/1828425787583930607
Taejun Kim,
I thought you were asking for approaches to time management and setting priorities. Your question showed up on my time line. Probably because of things I write, work on, or follow. I turned 75 this year, and it seems like a time to set priorities and review. We only get a short 100 years or so; most get less.
Your profile says you are working at the Kaist HCI Lab. I am fairly certain that stands for Human Computer Interface or Human-Computer Interaction. But it is not written out. The About page does say “we mainly work on new interaction techniques for new types of computers” so I will label it as “human computer interaction” for now.
I see you presented a paper “QuadStretcher: A Forearm-Worn Skin Stretch Display for Bare-Hand Interaction in AR/VR (ACM CHI 2024)” which you do not link but it is mentioned on GitHub, ResearchGate and elsewhere.
https://github.com/taejun20/QuadStretcher
I think you will get more hits if you say “tractor” and “tractors”, not “tactors”. I see that Geehyuk Lee uses the term “Tactons“. On his page at https://hcil.kaist.ac.kr/2022/09/29/wristmenu-with-tactons-is-accepted-for-ijhci/ my immediate response was “geometry is easier with field methods” – acoustic, electromagnetic, even gravitational”.
A “tractor beam” allows field driven push, pull, compression, applying tension, and sensing. Using mechanical devices is an expensive way. Many people would use “flow sensing” which can be done with mouse and cameras and sensor arrays now. And, flexible electrokinetic materials.
Clarifying “bare arm” is helpful. I would aim for “non-contact” methods. For healthcare, education, industrial, business, and many active human situations – safety and reliability concerns often preclude putting anything on a human at all. Making “hardware” and “devices” is much more difficult now – infection, safety, breakage, liability, cost, storage, delivery, repair, updates.
And intelligent “eye” that can “see” telescopic, microscopic, multispectral – as needed – would have wide uses. Looking at the whole human, there are many clues to track and communicate intention. And I see groups using machine training and deep correlations for that often these days. Including many hand arm finger tracking ones.
Stretch, tension, compression are fast growing topics on the Internet. It extends to things “vacuum tension”, “negative pressures”, “magnetic tension”, “surface tension”. I was reviewing that recently so I have it in mind. I often try to trace out how small groups like yours tap into global trends. It is hard but critically important.
Working in Korean and English has some limitations. For the Internet Foundation, my rule is “all humans, all human languages, all domain specific languages (all topics)”. I have great respect for “Sejong the Great” and his promotion of Hangul as a universal phonetic alphabet. It is possible to do that for all human languages, and doing it might well have more impact than any devices intended to be sold to humans.
My younger brother, Jeff, broke his neck and was completely paralyzed on a respirator (C2) for about two years before he died. That was in 1987-1989. So I spent a considerable effort to build computer interfaces for him where human movements were not possible. So I am biased to non-contact methods of determining human intent, and for putting information into human brains. I wrote three science fiction books more than a decade ago that talk about things related to what happened to him. By a strange quirk of fate, the woman who translated the first book into Bangla several years ago, her husband broke his neck three weeks after they were married and was completely paralyzed, but could breath on his own (C4). He died just over a year ago of respiratory complications. Each person is unique and fitting a rigid or flexible solid device to each is possible, but requires much more precise and detailed data than a few human designers can get by looking or thinking.
I only glanced at https://kaist.ac.kr/kr/ which does translate, except the signs and text in the images are not translatable to all human languages (about 7000 known and 200-300 active and used by large groups on the Internet). The Kaist YouTube channel is primitive and has no captions or automated language translation. Black and white splash pages and slides do not tell a clear story. https://kaist.ac.kr/site/history/#
I saw “USAID” and “fish” in the video. When I was working at Georgetown University Center for Population Research (1979-1985) that was mostly all for USAID population projects in Africa but I did spend three of those years (1983-1985) in a government position still working for GU to set up the USAID central Economic and Social Database. Then I spent about 2.5 years setting up the Famine Early Warning System for USAID and the US State Department. Since I was promoting methods for designing and improving sustainable systems in international development, I work on “all countries, all knowledge, all issues, all projects”, I had to try to see the whole picture out at least 50 years, or more. Now I go 300 years or more.
Searching ( “KAIST” “Korea” “USAID” ) I found https://www.kaist.ac.kr/en/html/kaist/011701.html which gives a bit of the background for KAIST which opened in 1971 as a Korean initiative with Kun-Mo Chung’s proposal to USAID, “The Establishment of a New Graduate School of Applied Science and Technology in Korea” a founding event.
That gave me background and https://www.kaist.ac.kr/en/html/kaist/01.html#0114 shows some basic statistics, except no dates or times or deeper data. The hierachy of the organizations is listed at https://www.kaist.ac.kr/en/html/kaist/011501.html, but it is a dynamic network and should be shown as such.
So it is not “the Kaist lab doing human computer interaction research” as I first thought, rather a traditional group organized as an academic university.
Every part of KAIST, every part of all schools, universities, education and learning in Korea is affected by human-computer limitations. Every part of all schools, universities, education and learning in the world is affected. All human futures are affected by human computer interactions.
I like watching Korean historical dramas. I have not seen any good one in a while. I like seeing the troubles and solutions when millions of humans try to work in one geographic area.
Hope that answers your “???” somewhat. I put “review Korea again” on my list for this week. I am curious about your President’s “Global Strategy Institute”, so I bookmarked that in the folder. All your colleges are using paper and human memory as the tools for organizing and communicating. From 26 years of analyzing groups on the Internet, in history and society, that is guaranteed to fail (relative to other ways) over time. Probably the reason so many Korean historical dramas show endless in-fighting (all human groups still using paper and human memory cells). lol!
What does “KAIST” stand for?
Korea(n) Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAIST
https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/한국과학기술원
Filed as (Where does Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology fit into global human knowledge?)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
