Journalist
Park Sae-jin박세진
swatchsjp@ajupress.com
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience.
"Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
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Kookmin University wins 9-year Seoul AI mobility grant SEOUL, August 05 (AJP) - Seoul will bankroll a Kookmin University plan to knit self-driving cars, delivery robots and air taxis into a single artificial intelligence system for the capital, committing up to 8 billion won, about $5.6 million at current exchange rates, over as long as nine years. Kookmin University said Tuesday that its Automotive Convergence College had been selected for the Seoul Anchor 10 Challenge, one of the funding tracks in the city's 2026 regional talent development system. The system, known by the English acronym ANCHOR, is the Ministry of Education's rebranded version of RISE, the framework that hands central government money for university funding to provincial and metropolitan governments to spend on their own priorities. The ministry announced the reorganization in April, saying the earlier version had produced regionally tailored projects without results that students could feel. The Anchor 10 Challenge is the long-horizon research piece of that structure. Universities pick their own target rather than answering a government-written brief, and the money is meant to run through to patents and commercial licensing rather than stopping at published papers. Nine years of funding is not guaranteed at the outset. Seoul's public notice for the program set an initial phase running to February 2028, with the extension going to the top half of participating universities at a mid-term review. Kookmin University will run the work through a unit it calls the AI-SAT Mobility Project Group, led by Shin Sung-hwan, a professor in the Automotive Convergence College. The acronym stands for sense, act and trust, covering a system that reads the city's traffic environment, decides how to move through it, and does so in a way residents are willing to accept. The technical goal is a platform the university has named AI-Defined Mobility, or ADM, which would place autonomous vehicles, mobile robots and urban air mobility aircraft under one decision-making layer instead of leaving each to operate on its own logic. Urban air mobility refers to the small electric aircraft, often described as air taxis, that South Korean transport planners expect to begin carrying passengers over cities within the next several years. Researchers plan to use the platform to work through five problems the city has flagged: traffic congestion, accident risk, urban noise, restricted movement for elderly and disabled residents, and public distrust of autonomous systems. Testing will happen on Seoul streets rather than in a laboratory. The university said it would gather data with the metropolitan government and district offices in congested areas, accident hotspots and neighborhoods that generate frequent noise complaints. Among the technologies to be validated is vehicle-to-everything communication, or V2X, the system that lets cars exchange information directly with traffic signals, road sensors and one another. The project also covers communication security for urban air mobility aircraft and robots, along with a testing environment designed to track public willingness to use the technologies over an extended period. Joining Shin on the research team are professors Yang Ji-hyun, Kim Jong-chan, Lim Se-jun, Song Kyo-won, Jeon Sang-hoon, Lee Seung-mok and Kim San-min. For Kookmin University, the award lands in its 80th anniversary year and slots into KMU VISION 2035: EDGE, the mid-to-long-term strategy the school proclaimed last October. Mobility is one of eight fields the university has designated for concentrated investment, alongside automotive engineering, software and autonomous driving research. Other Seoul universities picked for the same track this year are pursuing sharply different targets. Dongguk University is working on optical semiconductors for AI applications, while Sookmyung Women's University is pursuing anti-aging therapies aimed at extending healthy lifespan by a decade. "This selection came on the strength of the convergence research capacity Kookmin University has built up in automotive and mobility engineering and artificial intelligence," Shin said. "We will carry out the project so the results connect to patents and technology commercialization, and contribute to the growth of Seoul's future mobility industry." --- AJP Takeaways: ● Kookmin University said Tuesday its Automotive Convergence College was selected for the Seoul Anchor 10 Challenge, a city research track funding up to 8 billion won, about $5.6 million, over as long as nine years. ● The AI-SAT Mobility Project Group, led by Kookmin University professor Shin Sung-hwan, will build a platform called AI-Defined Mobility that places autonomous vehicles, mobile robots and urban air mobility aircraft under a single decision-making layer. ● Field testing will run on Seoul streets with the metropolitan government and district offices, covering congested areas, accident hotspots and neighborhoods with frequent noise complaints, and validating vehicle-to-everything communication and communication security for aircraft and robots. ● Funding is not guaranteed for the full term. Seoul's public notice set an initial phase running to February 2028, with the extension going to the top half of participating universities at a mid-term review. 2026-08-05 11:06:54 -
Seoul targets Central Asia minerals at first summit SEOUL, August 04 (AJP) - South Korea is within 40 days of hosting the leaders of all five Central Asian states for the first time, and the government spent Tuesday afternoon checking whether the deliverables it wants on energy and critical minerals will actually be ready. The region matters to Seoul mostly because of what is under it. Kazakhstan produced 25,839 tonnes of uranium in 2025, roughly 40 percent of world output, and has been the largest producer since 2009, according to the World Nuclear Association. It also holds 14 percent of global uranium resources. South Korea, which runs 26 nuclear reactors, is one of the main Asian buyers alongside China and India. The five countries also sit on oil, natural gas and rare earths. Kazakhstan ranked third among South Korea's titanium suppliers and tenth for chromium as of 2022, with smaller shares of vanadium and nickel imports. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun chaired the second meeting of the preparatory committee for the summit at the Government Complex Seoul, and framed the timing in terms of supply disruption. "With the Russia-Ukraine war and instability in the Middle East deepening uncertainty in the international order and in energy supply chains, and with the strategic value of Central Asia growing given its abundant energy and critical minerals and its geopolitical weight, this is a very important summit for us," he said. He listed the commercial target directly. "We will strengthen cooperation on supply chains, customs and regulation to expand trade and investment, and promote mutually beneficial practical cooperation in energy, critical minerals and infrastructure," Cho said. That is one of five outcomes the ministry wants from September. The others cover institutionalizing the summit itself, securing Central Asian backing on the Korean Peninsula, opening cooperation on terrorism, transnational crime, narcotics and cyber threats, and expanding into artificial intelligence, digital, intellectual property and climate response. The fifth is people, and Cho spent more time on it than on any other single item. "In particular, we will support the community of roughly 320,000 Koryoin in Central Asia so that they can serve as a bridge linking the two regions," he said, "and, marking the 90th anniversary in 2027 of Koryoin settlement in Central Asia, we will pursue cooperation projects that shed new light on the diaspora community's historical contribution." Koryoin, or Koryo-saram, are the descendants of Koreans who moved into the Russian Far East from the late 19th century and were deported to Central Asia by Soviet authorities in 1937. Roughly 172,000 people were loaded onto trains and sent to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan over several weeks, and thousands died in transit or during the first winter. The 2027 anniversary marks 90 years since that deportation. Their descendants now form the largest Korean diaspora community in the region, and the ministry has treated them as a diplomatic asset. Cho also promised support on education, culture, Korean language teaching and exchanges of students and industrial workers. South Korea is the last significant player to build this format. The Central Asian five began holding their own regular leaders' meetings in 2018, and have since sat down at summit level with the United States, China, Japan, Russia and the European Union. "Central Asian countries have regularized their regional summits since 2018 and have held summits with major countries including the United States, China, Japan, Russia and the European Union," Cho said. "This time our government too, with Korea-centered pragmatic diplomacy and diversification of diplomacy as its keynote, seeks through this summit to inherit and develop the New Northern Policy and to build a new strategic partnership with Central Asia." The New Northern Policy dates to the Moon Jae-in administration, which used it to push economic engagement with Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. Cho's phrasing keeps the label while attaching it to the Lee Jae Myung government's stated line on diversification. Seoul does have a track record to build on. The Korea-Central Asia Cooperation Forum has met at the foreign minister level every year since 2007. "We must now raise this ministerial-level basis for cooperation to the leaders' level and make it regular, developing Korea-Central Asia relations into a more strategic and future-oriented cooperation framework," Cho said. Tuesday's meeting was the last of its kind before the summit. "Today's meeting has the character of what is effectively the final preparatory meeting for the summit that opens on Sept. 16," Cho said at the outset, adding that remaining problems would be worked out at staff level from here. President Lee called each of the five leaders after taking office to explain the plan and issue the invitation, and all five confirmed attendance in December. About 600 delegates are expected, including ministers, business executives and press. Since the first preparatory committee meeting in February, a senior officials' meeting at vice-minister level has convened three times, in Seoul, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Joint economic committees, policy consultations and consular talks have run with each country, and a private advisory committee supplied sector expertise. Not everything is settled. Cho told the ministries around the table that negotiations on deliverable projects remain open with barely six weeks left. "I ask each ministry to take an interest and see it through to the end, so that the deliverable projects under negotiation are concluded quickly and the side events are prepared without disruption," he said. 2026-08-04 17:13:33 -
ARMY answers Grammys as BTS lets music speak Two sold-out nights at MetLife Stadium passed without a word from the stage about the group's Grammy withdrawal. The jumbotron told a different story. For two and a half hours at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on Saturday night, the biggest band in the world played 23 songs and said nothing at all about the Grammy Awards. This was three days after the group had announced it would not submit its music to the 69th ceremony. The omission was noticeable enough that Billboard's reviewer flagged it, reporting that no direct extension of the statement came from the stage, and that RM instead told the crowd he wanted to stay positive and would never take their love for granted. The statement itself, posted on July 29 to all seven members' Instagram accounts, ran to three sentences. "We have decided not to submit to the Grammys this year," it read. "We hope that music can be heard and loved as music itself, rather than being divided by region or language. We thank ARMY and everyone who is always with us." No grievance was named, no condition set for returning, and no mention made of the new category that had prompted the decision. Whatever the group had to say on the subject, it had said, and evidently considered the matter closed. The audience did not consider it closed. Before the encore, when personalized signs from the floor went up on the stadium screens, the cameras lingered on messages that had nothing to do with love or gratitude. Fans held up placards and cardboards with messages written on them: "BTS Are Bigger Than the Grammys," "Who Needs a Grammy When You Have an ARMY?" and "ARMY's Winner Album of the Year, BTS, ARIRANG." One sign read, "Beyond categories, the music is ours." That last one is a more precise statement of the argument than anything produced by the institution it criticizes, and it was written by hand, on cardboard, by someone who paid for a ticket. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. needed considerably more words to make his case, and made a weaker one. Responding on July 29 to the group's withdrawal, he said he was saddened but understood and respected the decision, then moved to correct what he saw as a misreading of the new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category. It was created to celebrate the depth and diversity of Asian pop, he said, and more categories mean more artists recognized, never to divide but to expand who is recognized by the Recording Academy's 15,000 voters. He added that submitting in a genre category does not exclude an artist from the General Field, and that recognition in one and recognition in the other are not mutually exclusive. He was defending the rulebook against an objection that was never about the rulebook. Nobody has claimed the Recording Academy formally bars Asian artists from Record, Song, or Album of the Year. The claim is that those 15,000 voters considered BTS five times between 2021 and 2023, during the group's commercial peak, and declined five times, and that the sorting has already been happening without any rule requiring it. A homemade sign got to the heart of this in six words. The chief executive took several paragraphs and arrived somewhere adjacent. This is what has changed in the week since the announcement, and it is why the story has not settled. The refusal is no longer in the group's hands, and the argument is being carried by people who did not clear it with anyone. That distinction matters because of the criticism the withdrawal drew in Seoul. Korean commentators noted quickly that this might be strategy rather than principle, pointing out that most of ARIRANG is in English and would not have qualified for the Asian pop category anyway, and that the General Field was never a realistic prospect. The reasoning is sound and worth taking seriously. HYBE has a communications department, and communications departments do not issue statements from seven accounts simultaneously by accident. What HYBE does not have is control over what people write on cardboard. Nobody approved "Who Needs a Grammy When You Have an ARMY?" and the camera operator who put it on a screen the size of a house was making an editorial choice in real time. A corporate statement can be walked back, clarified, softened in a follow-up interview. A stadium cannot. The venue itself supplied the rest of the argument without anyone needing to make it. BTS had already played MetLife once this year before Saturday, performing "Dynamite" at the first World Cup final halftime show on July 19 alongside Madonna, Shakira, Coldplay and Justin Bieber, in front of the largest television audience available on the planet. "Dynamite" is the song that earned the group its first Grammy nomination in 2021, and it is performed entirely in English, meaning it would not qualify for the Asian pop category the Recording Academy has now built for artists like them. The song that opened the door in 2021 would be turned away at the new one. The show that followed was not the work of a group seeking anyone's approval. Reviewing Saturday night, NJ Arts described members who looked visibly older and harder, dressed in black behind dark sunglasses, with tattoos and weathered faces visible on the overhead screens. The famous precision had loosened into something easier, the members lingering with one another and wandering the stage rather than holding formation. Thirteen of the 23 songs came from ARIRANG, an album built around Korean culture, and at one point the stage was ringed in light arranged to evoke the taegeuk at the center of the South Korean flag. Six weeks after the Recording Academy announced a category for music that makes meaningful use of an Asian language, BTS filled an American football stadium twice with a show that centers Korea and asked nothing of anyone. Submissions for the 69th Grammy Awards close on August 28, and nominations arrive in November. Whoever is named in the Best Asian Pop Music Performance category will be named without the participation of the largest act the category was designed to attract, and the Recording Academy will have to explain the absence to an audience that has already stated its position in marker on cardboard. BTS plays Gillette Stadium in Foxborough on Wednesday and Thursday, then Baltimore, Arlington, Chicago, and four nights in the Los Angeles area in September, where the ceremony itself will be held in February. 2026-08-04 16:36:43 -
Japan calls South Korea partner, claims Dokdo again SEOUL, August 04 (AJP) - Japan's annual defense white paper describes South Korea as an important neighbor and a partner it should work with on shared international challenges. The same document, published Tuesday, again calls Dokdo, an islet located in the East Sea, Japanese territory. The government lodged a formal protest and demanded immediate withdrawal of the claim, which has appeared in the white paper every year since 2005, now 22 years running. Dokdo consists of two main islets, Dongdo and Seodo, and 89 smaller rocks, covering roughly 187,554 square meters in the East Sea. It sits 87.4 kilometers (54.3 miles) from Ulleungdo and 157.5 kilometers from Japan's Oki Islands. On a clear day, it is visible from Ulleungdo. It is not visible from Oki. The islets carry a South Korean address, Dokdo-ri, Ulleung-eup, Ulleung County, North Gyeongsang Province. A police detachment has been stationed there since 1954, when a lighthouse also began operating, and a small number of civilians are registered as residents. The Foreign Ministry issued a spokesperson's commentary saying the government strongly protests the repetition of an unjust territorial claim over what it called historically, geographically and legally South Korean territory. "The government makes clear once again that Japan's unjust claim has no effect whatsoever on our sovereignty over Dokdo," foreign ministry spokesperson park Doo-soon said. He added that South Korea will respond firmly to any Japanese provocation regarding Dokdo. Japan's cabinet approved the 2026 white paper earlier the same day. The text says territorial issues remain unresolved over what it calls Japan's inherent territory in the Northern Territories, meaning the four southernmost Kuril Islands held by Russia, and Takeshima, the Japanese name for Dokdo. The wording matched previous editions. So did the maps. A chart of the security environment around Japan again marked the islets as a territorial dispute, a surveillance map drew the surrounding waters as Japanese territorial sea, and a diagram explaining South Korea's air defense identification zone labeled the islets Takeshima. The partner language has now run for three years. Material on South Korea took up less space than last year. This was the first defense white paper issued under Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae. The Dokdo passage survived the change of government intact. Japan's Foreign Ministry made the same claim in its diplomatic bluebook on April 10, prompting the ministry to summon Matsuo Hirotaka, the Japanese Embassy's minister-counselor, to hear a protest in person. In July last year, deputy chief of mission Iseki Yoshiyasu was called in over the previous defense white paper. That difference in sight lines between Ulleungdo and Oki runs through the historical record. The earliest reference appears in the Samguk Sagi, the 12th-century history of the Three Kingdoms, which records that the Silla general Isabu subjugated the island polity of Usan-guk in 512. Usan-guk was centered on Ulleungdo and its territory included the smaller islets to the southeast. The Sejong Sillok Jiriji, a geographical survey completed in 1454, states that Usan and Mureung lie in the sea due east of Uljin County, and that the two are close enough for one to be seen from the other when the weather is clear. Mureung is Ulleungdo. Usan is Dokdo. Only Dokdo satisfies the visibility condition. The Sinjeung Dongguk Yeoji Seungnam, an expanded national gazetteer published in 1531, repeated the description and included Usando on its maps. Japan's own records point in the same direction. In 1877, the Meiji government's Grand Council of State, the Dajokan, responded to an inquiry from the Home Ministry about whether Ulleungdo and one other island should be entered into Shimane Prefecture's land registry. The directive instructed officials to bear in mind that Ulleungdo and the other island had nothing to do with Japan. The Dajokan was the highest organ of state at the time, with authority over legislation, administration and the judiciary. Its ruling on a question of territorial extent bound the entire government, not just the ministry that asked. An attached map, the Gijukdo Yakdo, identifies the second island as Dokdo. That directive followed decades of earlier settlement. After the Joseon fisherman An Yong-bok crossed to Ulleungdo and was seized by Japanese fishermen in 1693, the two governments spent three years arguing over access. In 1696 the Tokugawa shogunate banned Japanese vessels from sailing to Ulleungdo, closing the dispute. In October 1900, the Korean Empire issued Imperial Decree No. 41, elevating Ulleungdo to Uldo County and defining the county magistrate's jurisdiction as Ulleungdo, Jukdo and Seokdo. Seokdo means rocky island, a rendering of the local name for Dokdo. The decree was promulgated in the official gazette on Oct. 27, five years before Japan acted. Japan's incorporation came on Feb. 22, 1905, through Shimane Prefecture Public Notice No. 40. It was issued during the Russo-Japanese War, was never published in Japan's national gazette, and was not communicated to the Korean government. By then Korea's capacity to object had already been cut away. The Japan-Korea Protocol of February 1904 permitted Japanese forces to use Korean territory for military purposes, and the first Japan-Korea Agreement of August 1904 installed Japanese advisers inside the Korean government. Japan built a naval watchtower on the islets in 1905 to track the Russian fleet. Uldo County magistrate Sim Heung-taek learned of the incorporation only in March 1906, from a Shimane survey party that landed on Ulleungdo. He reported to his superiors that an island belonging to his county had been declared Japanese. The State Council responded through Directive No. 3 that the claim was entirely without foundation and ordered a further investigation. After Japan's defeat in World War II, the Allied powers took the islets out of Japanese hands. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Instruction No. 677, issued on Jan. 29, 1946, suspended Japanese administrative authority over Ulleungdo, Dokdo and Jeju Island. A follow-up instruction that June placed Dokdo outside the area open to Japanese fishing. Japan rests its modern case on the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco. Article 2 names Jeju, Geomundo and Ulleungdo among the territories Japan renounced, and does not name Dokdo. Tokyo reads that omission as recognition of Japanese title. Seoul reads the list as illustrative rather than exhaustive, covering three of the roughly 3,000 islands surrounding the peninsula, and argues that the treaty did not reverse SCAPIN 677 or the Cairo Declaration of 1943, which committed the Allies to stripping Japan of territory taken by violence and greed. Japan also argues that its sovereignty was established in the 17th century, when the Oya and Murakawa merchant houses of Yonago received shogunal licenses to sail to Ulleungdo and used Dokdo as a waypoint. South Korea points out that the same shogunate banned those voyages in 1696, and that a navigation license is not a claim of title. South Korea declared sovereignty over the adjacent seas including Dokdo in January 1952, in what became known as the Peace Line. Japan protested that month. In 1954, Tokyo proposed taking the question to the International Court of Justice, and Seoul refused. Japan renewed the proposal in 1962 and again in 2012, and was refused both times. The South Korean position has not moved since. There is no territorial dispute to adjudicate, because the islets are South Korean territory under effective administration. 2026-08-04 16:21:27 -
US Ambassador Steel presents credentials, formally begins mission in Seoul SEOUL, August 04 (AJP) - The United States Embassy in Seoul has a full ambassador again for the first time in a year and a half after the new envoy Michelle Steel submitted a copy of her credentials to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday afternoon and paid a courtesy call on Foreign Minister Cho Hyun. The post had run on a chargé d'affaires since last ambassador Philip Goldberg appointed under President Joe Biden, left Seoul in January 2025. Steel is the first ambassador to South Korea named by President Donald Trump in his second term and the second Korean American to hold the job, after Sung Kim. She landed at Incheon International Airport on July 30. An incoming envoy cannot start official work here until a copy of the credentials issued by their head of state reaches the ministry's chief of protocol, a position held by Kim Tae-jin. The original goes to the president later, in a separate ceremony that completes the accreditation. Ministry spokesperson Park Doo-soon said the call on Cho was arranged as an introductory meeting, with the two sides planning to exchange views on ways to advance the alliance. The ceremony with President Lee Jae Myung has no date yet, according to Park adding the timing would follow a review of the presidential office's schedule. "Ambassador Steel has a great deal of understanding and insight into the alliance and the bilateral relationship, we expect her to contribute to strengthening that relationship and to deepening friendship between the two peoples," she said. Steel, arriving with her husband-attorney Shawn, did not share what she would raise with Cho. The couple enjoyed a day-out at Namdaemun and attended a service at Yeongnak Church in central Seoul during their first weekend in Seoul. 2026-08-04 15:34:34 -
Kookmin University, KOICA train 30 Palestinian AI researchers SEOUL, August 04 (AJP) - A new fellowship program will bring 30 Palestinian researchers to Seoul for doctoral study in artificial intelligence, with the entire course built around what they do after they go home. Kookmin University's Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation and its Global Development Cooperation Institute said Monday that they would run the AI Ph.D. Fellowship Program together with the Korea International Cooperation Agency. Fellows will enroll in doctoral courses at the university's AI and Software Graduate School, studying core AI technology alongside applications in industry and the public sector. The program is the talent component of a $15 million South Korean aid project to strengthen research and development capacity for digital transformation in Palestine. Palestinian news agency Sada News reported that the project agreement was signed in August 2025 by the Palestinian ministries of planning and international cooperation and of education and higher education, and that the project runs through 2031. The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) is the grant aid arm of South Korea's foreign ministry. It has run education and vocational training programs in Palestine since 2009 and said in 2023 that it had spent $33.6 million on youth education there. Research topics will be selected in connection with problems Palestine currently faces, so that findings can be applied to local problem-solving rather than sitting in a journal. KOICA and the university will manage the teaching and research process with that outcome in mind. Fellows will take AI coursework, run joint research with South Korean teams, work on industry-academic projects, take internships, present at international conferences and go through technology commercialization programs. Kookmin University said the goal is to send them home with research ability, practical problem-solving skills, project planning and management experience, and a working international network. The design is what separates the program from a standard scholarship, the university said. Most degree support ends at graduation. This one treats graduation as the midpoint. Fellows are expected to return to Palestine and work as the connective tissue between universities, research institutes and industry, pushing research results toward products, services and new companies. "The AI Ph.D. Fellowship does not stop at giving talented Palestinians a chance to earn a degree," said Cho Hyun-kyu, who heads KOICA's Palestine office. "It lays the ground for them to lead research and development and digital transformation at home after they return. I hope South Korea's experience in AI research and education primes the pump for sustainable digital innovation in Palestine." The program also feeds into Kookmin University's medium- and long-term plan, KMU VISION 2035: EDGE, adopted as the school marks its 80th anniversary. The university, founded in 1946, has named AI+X one of eight priority fields and is expanding teaching and research that combine AI with industry, health care, education and public services. "The greatest strength of our AI and Software Graduate School is a curriculum centered on AX, or AI transformation, which does not confine AI to research or software implementation but extends it into real systems and industrial settings such as industrial innovation, health care, education and public services," said Lee Sang-hwan, a professor in Kookmin University's School of Software who is serving as project manager. "We will work to make sure the results of this program translate into better public services in Palestine, jobs for young people, industrial innovation and digital transformation." A KOICA notice recruiting consultants for the parent project, posted in March 2025, listed analysis of plans to establish an AI research institute in Palestine among the assigned tasks. Kookmin University did not say when selection of the 30 fellows would begin. 2026-08-04 11:10:49 -
South Korea moves to protect 3 century-old temple toilets SEOUL, August 04 (AJP) - Three wooden outhouses still in daily use at South Korean Buddhist temples are in line to become national heritage, a decision that pushes state protection past the golden halls and stone pagodas of temple life and into the buildings where monks actually lived. The Korea Heritage Service (KHS) issued advance notice Tuesday of the designation of three temple latrines as national folklore cultural heritage. They are the Cheukgan at Seonamsa in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province, the Haeuso at Bodeoksa in Yeongwol, Gangwon State, and the Haeuso at Gugiram, a hermitage within the Haeinsa complex in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province. All three were built more than a century ago. They stand on their original sites in close to their original form, and they are still used by the monks who live there. Haeuso means the place where you set down your worries, and the name is more recent than the buildings. KHS credits the coinage to the monk Gyeongbong at Geungnagam, a hermitage at Tongdosa, in the years after the Korean War, and says it spread from there until it became the standard word for a temple toilet. Before that, temples used Cheukgan, the ordinary word for a latrine, or Dwitgan, or the scriptural Cheongcheuk. The building had status regardless of what it was called. In the Seon tradition, a monastery was organized around seven core structures. The latrine, known as Dongsa or the east hall, was one of them, alongside the Buddha hall, the lecture hall, the gate, the monks' quarters, the kitchen and the bath. Monastic codes set out how it was to be entered and used. For two of the three, the notice points to a promotion rather than a first recognition. Seonamsa's toilet has been listed as a South Jeolla provincial cultural heritage resource since June 2001, and Bodeoksa's has carried a Gangwon listing since January 2003. No equivalent provincial listing exists for the Gugiram building, which would enter the register directly at the national level. Moving up from a provincial list to the national one tightens the permit requirements for any repair or alteration and opens access to central government funding. Each building can be dated precisely, because Korean carpenters wrote the construction date in ink on the underside of the ridge beam when they raised the frame. Bodeoksa's toilet was built in 1882, and Gugiram's in 1910. Seonamsa's is harder to pin down. A 1704 temple record refers to a Cheongcheuk on the site, and a photograph from the Japanese colonial period shows the building in place, while an ink inscription records a repair in 1928. KHS dates it to sometime before the 1920s. Two of the three sit inside UNESCO World Heritage sites. Seonamsa was inscribed in 2018 as part of the Sansa group of mountain monasteries. Haeinsa holds the Tripitaka Koreana, the 13th century set of more than 80,000 carved woodblocks, in a depository that is itself World Heritage. Bodeoksa carries a different kind of weight. Founded in 668 by the monk Uisang, it was renamed and made the guardian temple of Jangneung, the tomb of King Danjong, the boy king deposed by his uncle and put to death in exile in Yeongwol in 1457. The buildings share a design logic. All three are cut into hillsides so that the front reads as a single story while the back drops away into a two-story pavilion, which lets waste fall clear and lets air move through the space underneath. There are no doors. Partitions rise to chest height, and slatted wooden windows sit at eye level, giving light, ventilation and a view of the mountainside at the same time. Bodeoksa's is the largest of the three, with 12 stalls in two rows of six, separated into sections for men and women, an arrangement that could handle a dozen people at once. Seonamsa's is the best known, familiar to Korean readers partly through a widely anthologized Jeong Ho-seung poem that instructs the grieving to travel there and weep. Outside the temple walls, the toilet occupied a different place in Korean life, and a more practical one. In a farming country with no sewers and no chemical fertilizer, human waste was an input. Households kept the Dwitgan at a distance from the living quarters, let the contents age for months, then carried them to the fields in an A-frame pack or in a squat earthenware jar called a Ttongjanggun. In cities, night soil collectors made the same journey on a larger scale, hauling buckets on carrying frames out to farmland at the edge of town. On Jeju Island, the latrine was built over a pigsty, and the pigs did the composting. Korean folk tales include the story of a miser who refused to relieve himself anywhere but at home, because the loss would have been real. Folk belief also placed a deity in the latrine, a bad-tempered one who had to be warned before anyone entered. Chemical fertilizer ended that economy. Ammonium sulfate and urea reached Korean farms in volume in the 1960s, and the value of night soil collapsed. Flush toilets and septic tanks spread through the 1970s and 1980s, first in apartment blocks and then almost everywhere else. Traditional latrines survived longest in rural villages and at temples, and they have been disappearing from both as buildings are modernized for hygiene, for visitor comfort and for the simple reason that a doorless structure with no plumbing is difficult to maintain. KHS describes the three buildings named Tuesday as heritage at risk of vanishing, and cites their continued use as part of what makes them valuable. At all three, the old cycle still runs. Waste is layered with rice hulls and fallen leaves, left to break down, and returned to temple fields as compost. The leaves also serve a more immediate purpose, which is to control the smell. KHS will take public comment for 30 days before the National Heritage Committee reviews the case and issues a final decision on designation. 2026-08-04 11:05:45 -
KAIST's AI builds workable schedules without optimization software SEOUL, August 03 (AJP) - Researchers in South Korea have taught an artificial intelligence system to draw up delivery routes, factory schedules and hospital rosters that a company can actually run, without handing the job to the specialist commercial software the industry now relies on to make the numbers work. In testing, the system produced a legal plan in 100 percent of the problems it was handed, across five benchmark sets used throughout the field. No comparable method that learns end-to-end has managed that on its own. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced the result on Monday. Kim Min-soo, a professor in the school of computing, led the team that built the system, which is called RL-SPH. The problem it goes after has a formal name in mathematics, integer linear programming, and a very ordinary shape in daily life. A courier company wants the shortest route. It also needs every parcel delivered, no van loaded past its capacity, and no driver kept behind the wheel longer than the law allows. A hospital wants a duty roster that covers every shift, respects rest requirements, and does not put the same nurse in two wards at once. A chip plant wants to hit its delivery dates without asking more of its equipment and its staff than they can give. Each of those conditions is a constraint. Break one and the plan is worthless, however efficient it looks on paper. A route that shaves 40 minutes off the day is no use if the van cannot physically hold the parcels. This is where AI has kept stumbling. Recent systems learned to guess at a cheap answer, and often guessed well on cost. They also produced plans that quietly violated a load limit or a working-hours rule. Companies dealt with that by passing the output to a solver, specialist optimization software that grinds through the arithmetic and repairs what the AI broke. The two best known, Gurobi and SCIP, do the heavy lifting in logistics and manufacturing worldwide. The AI never finished the job by itself. RL-SPH works more like a person redoing a timetable. Instead of predicting a finished answer in one shot, it starts with a plan that breaks the rules and edits it, one variable at a time. Change the number of vans. Change a shift length. See what broke and what got fixed, and learn from the result. The method behind it is reinforcement learning, in which a system improves through repeated trial and error rather than by studying worked examples. The design choice that matters is the order of priorities. The team told the system to find a legal plan first and a cheap one second. In a factory, that means locking in a schedule that meets every deadline and capacity limit, then squeezing cost and time out of it while keeping it legal. The researchers also proved mathematically that a system trained this way reaches a workable plan within a finite number of edits, rather than wandering indefinitely. Two other pieces make it faster. One is a model called ILP-GT, designed to catch relationships between variables sitting far apart in a problem, something earlier network designs handled poorly. The other is a search rule that targets the variables turning up most often in broken constraints instead of working through everything in turn. Across the five benchmarks, RL-SPH found a workable plan every time, including on harder cases involving variables that can take a wide range of values rather than a simple yes or no. Measured against existing methods that also hit a perfect record, it narrowed the distance to the theoretical best answer by 28.6 times on average and reached its first workable plan 2.5 times faster. Against the newest AI approaches, known as PAS, DDIM and DiffILO, it was the only one to hit 100 percent on all three benchmarks used in the comparison. Training took about 30 minutes, 14.7 times faster than established techniques and roughly 34 times faster than recent methods that learn without being shown correct answers. The team also ran it against MIPLIB, a public library of optimization problems that serves as a common yardstick for industry and academia. RL-SPH held up on problems as much as 67 times larger than anything in its training, and on problem types it had never encountered. "In the real world, a plan you can actually carry out matters more than the best possible answer," Kim said. He expects the method to become a foundation for AI-driven decisions in logistics, manufacturing, semiconductor production and workforce planning. Lee Tae-hoon, a doctoral student at KAIST, is the paper's first author, with Kim as corresponding author. The work was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, held from July 6 to 11 at COEX in Seoul. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: International Conference on Machine Learning Title: RL-SPH: Learning to Achieve Feasible Solutions for Integer Linear Programs Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.19517 2026-08-03 09:41:38 -
North Korea says peninsula conflict matter of time SEOUL, July 31 (AJP) - North Korea declared Friday that armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula is no longer a question of whether but of when, denouncing a personnel buildup at the US military command in Japan as proof that Washington is preparing for war in the region. The statement came days after Lt. Gen. Stephen Jost, commander of US Forces Japan, disclosed in an interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun published Saturday that his headquarters had added 215 personnel over the past year. The increase is part of a multiphase restructuring, launched in 2025 and scheduled to conclude in spring 2028, that is turning the command from an alliance management body into what US officials describe as a warfighting headquarters. Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a commentary that the buildup shows the command "is transforming into a 'war command' in both name and substance." The state-operated news agency said the reorganization's "sinister intention lies in using Japan's 'Self-Defense Forces' as shock troops and a core combat force for an all-out war in the Asia-Pacific region in a contingency." The commentary argued that North Korea itself would be the command's first objective. "Given that US Forces Japan is the core reinforcement the United States would send to South Korea first in a contingency on the Korean Peninsula, it is an undeniable fact that the primary target of this 'war command' is none other than our republic," it said. KCNA then delivered its starkest line. "As the enemies themselves have admitted, a physical clash on the Korean Peninsula today has clearly been defined not as a question of possibility, of whether it will happen or not, but as a question of time, of when it will happen," the commentary said. The wording echoed Jost's own remarks in the same Asahi Shimbun interview, in which he said the region must prepare "on the premise of not whether a crisis will occur, but when." The commentary also aimed recent allied military activity. It cited the Combined Joint Sustainment Training exercise conducted by the South Korea-US Combined Forces Command from July 13 to 16, using the epithet "South Korean puppet military gangsters" to describe the South's armed forces. It further pointed to an agreement by the top military officers of South Korea, the United States and Japan to continue the trilateral Freedom Edge exercises and deepen three-way security cooperation. North Korea cast those moves as justification for expanding its nuclear arsenal. "The desperate military adventurist acts of the United States are once again leading us to the irreversible conclusion that we must devote ourselves further to the ceaseless development and evolution of our self-defensive nuclear war deterrent," KCNA said. 2026-07-31 11:02:59 -
KAIST develops technologies to cut AI sensory hallucinations SEOUL, July 31 (AJP) - South Korean researchers have developed two technologies that stop artificial intelligence from claiming to hear sounds that were never recorded or see objects that do not exist, a step toward AI systems reliable enough for self-driving cars, rescue robots, and hospitals. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said Friday that a team led by Professor Ro Yong-man from the institute's School of Electrical Engineering developed techniques to address two persistent weaknesses in multimodal AI, systems that process text, images, and sound together. One teaches AI to correctly read specialized sensors, such as thermal cameras and X-rays. The other prevents the system from confusing what it sees with what it hears. Neither requires retraining the AI from scratch, which the institute said makes both fast and cheap to deploy in industry. The problem the team set out to solve is known as hallucination, the tendency of AI models to generate confident but false output. In multimodal systems the errors take a particular form. Shown silent security footage of a passing car, existing models often report hearing an engine, simply because a car is visible on screen. The first technology, which the team calls Diverse Negative Attributes (DNA), addresses how AI misreads sensors that measure signals other than visible light. A person looking at a thermal image knows the bright areas are hot. Conventional AI, trained mostly on ordinary photographs, tends to interpret the brightness as light. The team developed a training method that repeatedly feeds the model examples it gets wrong, teaching it the physical meaning behind thermal, depth, and X-ray imagery. The result is a system that recognizes objects more accurately in darkness and smoke, using only a small amount of additional data. The second technology, Modality-Adaptive Decoding (MAD), tackles the crossed wires between sight and sound. Before answering a question, the AI first asks itself whether the answer should come from the video or the audio, then concentrates on the relevant channel while suppressing interference from the other. Because the method works at the moment the AI generates its answer, it can be added to existing models like a software plug-in, with no retraining at all. KAIST said the technologies could serve autonomous vehicles that must spot pedestrians at night or in fog, rescue robots searching for survivors in smoke-filled buildings, drones carrying thermal cameras, airport security systems that analyze X-ray scans, and medical AI that reads CT, MRI, and X-ray images together. "For multimodal AI to be used in real environments, it is important that it accurately understands the characteristics of various sensors and does not confuse different sensory inputs," Ro said. "This research lays the groundwork for multimodal AI that can be trusted in daily life and industrial settings by reducing sensory bias and hallucination without large-scale retraining." Doctoral student Chung Sang-yun served as first author on both studies, with Yoo Young-jun joining as co-first author on the DNA research. The MAD study was presented in June at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the top international venue in the field, and the DNA study was published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and IEEE / CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Title: Enhanced Vision-Language Models for Diverse Sensor Understanding: Cost-Efficient Optimization and Benchmarking MAD: Modality-Adaptive Decoding for Mitigating Cross-Modal Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models Link/DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2412.20750 / 10.48550/arXiv.2601.21181 2026-07-31 09:51:43