Keynote Speech (I): What's the next with Google?  

Dr. Byung K. Yi, LG Electronics Inc.

Keynote Speech (II): Nanomaterials for Forefront Biotech Applications

Dr. Prof. Sungho Jin, Professor at UCSD

INVITED TALK (1): Nuclear Fusion: Inexhaustible Energy source candidate

Yongkyoon In, FAR-TECH, Inc.

Abstract

 Nuclear fusion has great potential to become an inexhaustible energy source, where most of the conventional energy resources (coals, oil, gas or nuclear fission) are expected to run out within several decades. Since the fusion fuels (hydrogen isotopes) can be easily obtained from seawater, the realization of the nuclear fusion reaction as energy source could be the ultimate solution to energy needs on Earth.  So far, scientists have already achieved each key parameter necessary for fusion plasmas in terms of density (~1x1020 m-3), temperature (~100,000,000 K), and energy confinement time (~1 sec), but only in the transient manner.  Thus, to obtain and explore the burning plasmas, which can be self-sustaining in a steady state, seven parties (US, EU, China, Japan, Korea, Russia, India) in the world are working together to construct the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experiment Reactor)  in France (to be completed by 2018). Though many science and technology questions about the burning fusion plasmas are expected to be answered in the ITER project, there should be at least another device (e.g. DEMO) that can demonstrate the commercial feasibility of fusion reactor concept as a power plant.  Meanwhile, the KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research), which was commissioned in Daejon, Korea in 2008, will be one of the leading fusion research reactors.

INVITED TALK (2): Multi-Sensor-Convergence: Frontier in Multimedia Communications

Sunghoon Hong, Ph. D.

 Abstract

Sensors play important roles in current mobile devices, specifically for multimedia services and applications for which physical quantities are converted into electrical signals, and the signals are processed, recognized, compressed or communicated by additional post-processing. However, future sensors (TrueSense) will have intelligence in itself, and will process, recognize, compress or communicate the converted physical quantities in a sensor itself to generate meaningful processed data. This direction of future sensor development resembles cognitive activities of human brain.  

Examples of TrueSense include 1) SmartVideo that segments ROI and background from captured video, then compress ROI with higher quality and background with higher compression to achieve visually equivalent quality with much lower bandwidth requirement, 2) Recognize objects of interest in the captured video, and communicate with contents server with much lower bandwidth requirement, and 3) Interactive 3D that can be reconstructed from captured 2D images by recognizing and image registering in the sensor itself.

INVITED TALK (3): Sciences in Drug Discovery and Development

Dr. Sanghee Yoo, Senior Scientist, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.