The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is the first and top science and technology university in South Korea. KAIST opened in 1971 with a special legislative mandate from the Korean government. The government mandated two founding missions to KAIST: to educate scientists and engineers who would work for the nation’s industrialisation; and to make innovations conducting basic and applied research, which would drive the nation’s economic growth.
Since then, KAIST has been the gateway to advanced science and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Our 62,000 graduates, including 12,400 PhDs, have been key players behind Korea’s innovations, especially informatisation.
In less than half a century, KAIST has emerged as the most innovative university in the Asia-Pacific region with 12,000 students enrolled in five colleges and six schools, including 1,000 international students from 92 countries. KAIST’s main campus is located in Daejeon, where Korea’s major R&D centres are clustered. Its College of Business is in Seoul.
KAIST fosters talents best fit for the new industrial era – people who are creative, collaborative and caring for others while creating new value. To this end, KAIST is introducing innovations in education, research and technology commercialisation. We are revising our educational curricula and teaching methodologies to provide transdisciplinary studies, create a convergence research environment, and boost entrepreneurship and start-up education.
KAIST has also been taking the lead in implementing many innovative academic systems for realising academic excellence. Unlike other domestic universities, KAIST is overseen by the Ministry of Science and ICT and has more leeway to implement innovative systems, such as our holistic admission system and English lectures across classes, for the first time in Korea.
KAIST began as a research-centred graduate school to confer doctoral and master’s degrees in science and technology. In 1986, KAIST began offering undergraduate degrees, but has always maintained a larger population of graduate students than undergraduates, demonstrating its steadfast commitment to research-led excellence.
KAIST researchers aim to be the best, the first and the only ones in their fields in the world. From the launch of Korea’s first satellite to building humanoid robots – which won the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge – KAIST has been behind technological breakthroughs in Korea. KAIST Institute serves as the hub of open innovation and inter- and multidisciplinary research. KI aims for innovative and futuristic convergence research among its six research groups: BioCentury, IT Convergence, Robotics, NanoCentury, Health Science and Technology, and Artificial Intelligence.
KAIST has also advocated for academic entrepreneurship through its focus on research and technology commercialisation, business incubation, and collaboration with surrounding R&D and venture clusters.
Our tradition of practical but top-quality research has led to the first generation of tech-based start-ups. These new ventures are leading the IT industry and beyond, creating a new role model for entrepreneurs. These accumulated experiences working with the private and public sectors have enriched KAIST’s research competitiveness and academic rigour. Accordingly, KAIST has developed top-notch global research capabilities through numerous industrial collaboration initiatives.
Consequently, our faculty members and researchers have been exposed naturally to an innovative research environment, which has led to filing a relatively high number of patents. According to mass media and information firm Thomson Reuters, KAIST filed 823 patents from 2010 to 2015 and had 82.1 per cent of its patent applications granted. This is the highest rate among universities in the Asia-Pacific region and makes KAIST the most innovative university in the region, according to Thomson Reuters, for three straight years from 2016.
Engineering fields, including electrical engineering, new materials and chemical engineering, have also performed well in many global performance evaluation indicators for years. KAIST hopes that its initiative towards dynamic convergence in R&D projects based on partnerships with industry will generate positive synergy that will spill over into economic value creation.
KAIST now has the opportunity to think boldly about what it can achieve over the next half century and beyond. Under Vision 2031, KAIST continues to strive to make the world better through the pursuit of excellence in education, research, entrepreneurship and globalisation.