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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Croatia turns to S. Korean rockets as U.S. blocks long-range munitions SEOUL, September 04 (AJP) - Eighteen truck-mounted rocket launchers able to strike targets more than 300 kilometers away are set to enter Croatian service, bought from South Korea after the United States suspended deliveries of the long-range rockets Zagreb had already contracted for. The Croatian government was scheduled to approve the purchase of 18 K239 Chunmoo self-propelled multiple rocket launchers (MRLS) and their munitions at a cabinet session on Friday, the Zagreb daily Jutarnji list reported on Thursday (local time). The price is 435.2 million euros ($505.9 million) excluding value-added tax. Croatia contracted with the U.S. in late 2024 for eight HIMARS launchers. Washington has since halted deliveries to allies of rockets capable of reaching 300 kilometers because of its own stockpile requirements, and rockets capable of reaching 500 kilometers are barred from sale. That left Croatia holding launchers without access to the deep-strike ammunition that justified buying them. According to Croatia's Defense Minister Ivan Anušić, a deal with Hanwha Aerospace is expected to be signed shortly. A separate agreement covers Poland's WB Group, which will install the command and control system on the Croatian launchers. 85 percent of the order is due for delivery by 2028, with payments spread across 2026 to 2029. Talks between the Croatian defense ministry and its South Korean counterpart began about a year ago. The Chunmoo also fires a larger salvo than the American system, carrying two pods holding 12 rockets against one pod holding six. Approval would make Croatia the fourth European buyer, after Poland, Estonia and Norway. Both Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and President Zoran Milanović backed the purchase. Milanović announced new arms buying two months ago in Ankara, after a NATO summit, framing it as an answer to Serbia's acquisition of PULS, an Israeli rocket artillery system built by Elbit Systems. Croatia and Serbia fought a war between 1991 and 1995 and have both expanded their arsenals in recent years. "As a state we will have to counter that in some way, by equipping ourselves with something similar," Milanović said at the time, according to Jutarnji list's report. The K239 Chunmoo entered South Korean service in 2015 as a replacement for the K136 Kooryong, a 130mm rocket system fielded in 1986. Development began in 2009 under a program funded by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA), South Korea's arms procurement agency, and finished in 2013, with production starting the following year. More than 350 have been built. What sets the launcher apart is how it loads. Each vehicle carries two sealed pods on an eight-wheel truck chassis, and the two pods can hold different calibers at the same time. A commander can fire an area-saturation rocket and a precision-guided rocket from the same launcher without swapping hardware or returning to a depot. A typical Chunmoo vehicle carries a mixed load of four 280mm rockets in one pod and six guided 239mm rockets in the other. The 239mm rocket, steered by satellite and inertial navigation, reaches about 80 kilometers. A full load of 12 can be fired in under a minute. Unguided 130mm rockets pack 20 to a pod and reach roughly 36 kilometers, designed to blanket an area rather than hit a single point. The longest reach comes from one missile at a time. The CTM-290, a 600mm ballistic missile derived from the Korean Tactical Surface-to-Surface Missile (KTSSM) family, fills an entire pod on its own. After launch, it climbs to between 25 and 40 kilometers of altitude before diving on the target. The KTSSM's range is estimated to be more than 300 kilometers. Hanwha Aerospace and open technical references list it at about 290 kilometers, the figure its designation reflects. Newer guided rockets for the system have reportedly been offered at ranges up to 500 kilometers. The launcher weighs about 31 tons, travels at up to 80 kilometers per hour on road, and is run by a crew of three. Each launcher is paired with an ammunition resupply vehicle built on the same chassis. Poland opened the export run in 2022, signing a framework agreement for 288 systems in October of that year and a firm contract for 218 in November worth about $3.5 billion. Polish launchers ride on domestic Jelcz trucks and carry the Topaz fire control and Fonet communications systems made by WB Group, the same company now contracted for Croatia's command and control fit. Hanwha Aerospace has since set up a joint venture in Poland to build Chunmoo rockets in Europe. Estonia signed a defense cooperation agreement in Seoul in October 2025 to field the system alongside the American HIMARS it already operates. Norway signed in Oslo on Jan. 30 for 16 launch vehicles, a precision-guided missile package and logistics support, a contract Hanwha Aerospace valued at about $922 million inside a long-range fires program budgeted at roughly $2 billion. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates bought earlier and smaller batches. The Croatian contract covers launchers, rockets, logistics support, and six weeks of training. Operating all 18 launchers will take about 100 soldiers. Where they will be based within the Croatian Army has not been disclosed. AJP Takeaways - The Croatian government was set to approve the purchase of 18 K239 Chunmoo self-propelled multiple rocket launchers and munitions from Hanwha Aerospace for 435.2 million euros excluding VAT at a cabinet session Friday, Jutarnji list reported. - The United States has suspended deliveries to allies of rockets reaching 300 kilometers and barred sale of those reaching 500 kilometers, leaving Croatia with eight HIMARS launchers it contracted in late 2024 and no access to the deep-strike munitions behind the purchase. - President Zoran Milanović framed the new buy as an answer to Serbia's acquisition of the Israeli PULS system, announcing it in Ankara two months ago after a NATO summit. - Hanwha Aerospace signed a separate Chunmoo contract with Norway in Oslo on Jan. 30 covering 16 launch vehicles for about $922 million, following earlier orders from Poland and Estonia that would make Croatia the fourth European operator. 2026-09-04 14:21:08 -
KAIST method cuts 87 % of AI query errors and token costs SEOUL, September 04 (AJP) - When an artificial intelligence system writes a database query that will not run, the database that rejected it already knows what is wrong with it. Most systems treat that rejection as a plain failure signal and hand the whole query back to the AI to be written again from scratch. A team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has built software that reads the rejection as a set of directions and repairs only the broken piece. Tested on BIRD, a benchmark researchers use to compare systems of this kind, the software cleared up to 87.4 percent of the execution errors in queries the AI produced on its first attempt, and raised execution accuracy, the share of questions that come back with the right answer, by up to 5.8 percentage points over the strongest previous method. Measured against systems that regenerate the query from scratch, it consumed up to 15.1 times fewer tokens, the units of text a language model is billed by, and finished its repairs up to 29.6 times faster. The software is called SafeQL. It was built at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea's state-funded science and technology university, by a School of Computing team led by Kim Min-soo. Doctoral student Lee Geon-ho was the first author on the paper, and Kim was the corresponding author. The work was published in the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment and listed in the program of the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, which ran from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 in Boston. Databases answer only in SQL, short for Structured Query Language, a command language that requires every table and column to be named exactly as it exists in the system. Text-to-SQL tools remove that requirement. A manager can ask which product sold best last year, or which items are running low in stock, and the AI converts the question into SQL and returns the figures. The conversion goes wrong often enough to matter. A language model querying a company's sales records may invent a column that does not exist, call a function the database does not support, or link two tables in a way the underlying structure does not permit. The query fails to execute, and the AI comes back with nothing. Until now, the standard remedy has been to send the error message back to the model and ask for a replacement. Rewriting an entire document because one word in it is wrong carries an obvious cost, and query repair works the same way. Parts that were already correct can change, new errors can appear in place of the old one, and every round trip to the model spends more tokens and more time. SafeQL keeps the query the AI wrote and works from it. Reading the error the database reports alongside the schema it can inspect directly, the software locates the element that failed and replaces it, swapping a nonexistent column for a real one, adding a missing table link, or correcting a function or a search value. A single error usually has several plausible fixes, and testing all of them across a chain of repairs would multiply the candidates beyond any useful limit. KAIST defined the set of queries the database can actually execute as a safe query space, then searched toward it by trying first the candidates closest in structure and meaning to what the model originally wrote. Candidates whose data types do not match are discarded before they are tested. Kim and Lee proved mathematically that the search arrives at the safe query space within a finite number of steps. Rather than sit alongside the database, SafeQL runs inside PostgreSQL, the open source database system used across much of the software industry. Working from the parse tree PostgreSQL builds for every incoming command, it can pinpoint the failure even in long and heavily nested queries. Repeated similarity calculations are held in a cache and a vector index to keep the search cheap. When the first query is too badly broken to patch, the software calls the language model back for a fresh one and resumes the search from there. KAIST said the approach should reduce the cost and time of running AI on company data, and bring closer the point at which AI agents can handle sales, customer and inventory records reliably enough to be trusted with the work. Errors at the data access stage carry forward, since everything an agent does next rests on figures it was unable to retrieve in the first place. "For AI to take on real work at a company, accurately finding the data it needs is what matters," Kim said. On Spider, an older benchmark drawn from databases across many different fields, SafeQL reached 91.7 percent execution accuracy while using up to 96.5 times fewer tokens than regeneration methods and cutting repair time by up to 34.5 times. Title: SafeQL: Search-based Refinement for Safe and Efficient LLM-based Text-to-SQL Link/DOI: 10.14778/3819518.3819545 AJP Takeaways - KAIST's SafeQL repairs only the failed element of an AI-generated database query rather than regenerating the entire query, clearing up to 87.4 percent of execution errors on the BIRD benchmark. - Kim Min-soo's team reported token use down by up to 15.1 times and repair time down by up to 29.6 times against regeneration methods, with 91.7 percent execution accuracy on the Spider benchmark. - PostgreSQL hosts the software directly, giving it the database's own parse tree to locate failures inside long and heavily nested queries. - The VLDB Endowment published the paper in its Proceedings, and the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases listed it in a program that ran Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 in Boston. 2026-09-04 10:35:48 -
S. Korea to move ministries and state bodies out of Seoul SEOUL, September 03 (AJP) - Central government ministries and about 350 public institutions will start leaving the Seoul metropolitan area in 2027, advancing a project the Constitutional Court forced South Korea to scale back more than two decades ago. Prime Minister Han Seong-sook said Thursday the government would publish its list of institutions to be moved in the fourth quarter of this year and begin relocating them the following year. The list will be built under what she called a principle of minimum retention, meaning an institution stays in the capital region only if there is a compelling reason to keep it there. The 350 figure covers public institutions, a South Korean category running from state-owned energy and housing corporations to research institutes and small licensing bodies. About 525 exist nationwide with an authorized headcount of roughly 432,000. Han said they would be placed in clusters rather than parceled out across provinces. "We will avoid a share-the-spoils distribution and instead gather the energy of regional growth like a bonfire, concentrating institutions around the innovation cities to maximize the strength of regional hubs," she said at Government Complex Seoul. Innovation cities are planned districts built outside the capital region from 2005 to house institutions moved out of Seoul in the first relocation round. The ministries are the harder half of the announcement, because moving them requires changing the law. Interior and Safety Minister Yun Ho-jung said the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family would go to the central city of Sejong from the first half of 2027, ahead of other ministries, because their size and the ripple effects of their departure are large. Both are currently barred from moving. Article 16 of the Special Act on the Construction of the Multifunctional Administrative City in the Yeongi-Gongju Area, the 2005 law that created Sejong, names five ministries as excluded from relocation. They are Foreign Affairs, Unification, Justice, National Defense, and Gender Equality and Family. All five were held in the capital region on the argument that their work is bound tightly to the president, the National Assembly, and the judiciary. Yun said the government would push an amendment striking those ministries from the exclusion list. "We will also pursue a revision of the act that deletes the relevant institutions from the list of bodies excluded from relocation," he said. The route has been used before. The Interior and Safety Ministry was itself written into the exclusion list in a 2014 revision, removed by a further amendment in 2017, and relocated to Sejong afterward. Yun said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Unification would be considered for relocation in step with the presidential office move in 2030 and the opening of the National Assembly's Sejong chamber in 2033. That leaves the Ministry of National Defense as the only one of the five with no timetable attached to it. Agencies needing purpose-built accommodation will move later. Yun said the indictment agency and the serious crime investigation agency, along with the Korean National Police Agency, would relocate only after new buildings are finished. The first two launch on Oct. 2, when Korea abolishes its 78-year-old prosecution service and splits investigation from indictment. Institutions left unnamed on Thursday, including the Financial Services Commission, have not been ruled out. Yun said the final list would be confirmed and formally notified during the fourth quarter. The plan closes a fight running since the late President Roh Moo-hyun campaigned in 2002 on moving Cheong Wa Dae, the presidential office, and the ministries to the Chungcheong region in the center of the country. His New Administrative Capital Act was promulgated on Jan. 16, 2004. Ten months later, on Oct. 21, the Constitutional Court voided it, holding that Seoul's status as the capital forms part of an unwritten customary constitution built on some 600 years of practice, and that moving it would require a constitutional amendment or a national referendum. The Roh government returned in 2005 with a version that left the president in Seoul and sent the ministries alone. That became Sejong, and that is the version the court allowed to stand. President Lee Myung-bak tried to undo it. His government abandoned the ministry relocation in January 2010 and proposed converting Sejong into a self-sufficient education and business city. The National Assembly rejected the revision on June 29, 2010. Of 275 members present, 105 voted for it and 164 against, with six abstentions. Prime Minister Chung Un-chan, who had led the effort, resigned weeks later. Sejong launched as a special autonomous city on July 1, 2012, with a population of about 100,700. The presidential office planned there is due for completion in August 2029, nine months earlier than the original target, with groundbreaking set for 2027. The National Assembly's Sejong chamber is scheduled for 2033. Land, Infrastructure and Transport Minister Kim Yun-duk said the second round would not repeat the pace of the first, which took more than seven years from announcement to actual relocation. Institutions will move into leased private buildings starting next year rather than wait for new complexes to be finished. Kim said the criteria used to justify staying in Seoul during the first round would be reviewed in full, and that support would be weighted toward institutions that move farther and move sooner. He also said the first round failed to pull anchor companies and research institutes along with the relocated institutions, and that the second would group them by the strategic industry of the innovation city receiving them. Han said the government would cover relocation and housing costs for staff and improve schools and hospitals in the receiving areas. She acknowledged the plan would meet resistance. "It will not be without some disagreement and walls of competing interests," she said, promising to listen to local governments and labor groups. The government argues the concentration itself is the problem. Han said the capital region is saturated with people, capital, companies and infrastructure while other regions face depopulation. "Balanced growth is not a matter of choice. It has become a survival strategy for a sustainable Republic of Korea," she said. Seoul and the surrounding region will be redirected toward economic, cultural and international exchange functions, Han added. Kim set out the standard the fourth-quarter list will be measured against. "Unless an institution absolutely must remain, we will include it in the relocation in principle," he said. AJP Takeaways ● South Korea will start moving central government ministries and about 350 public institutions out of the Seoul metropolitan area in 2027, with the relocation list published in the fourth quarter of this year. ● The Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family go first, from the first half of 2027, but the National Assembly must first amend the 2005 law that bars them from moving. ● That law exempted five ministries from relocation. Foreign Affairs and Unification are now tied to the 2030 presidential office move and the 2033 National Assembly Sejong chamber, leaving National Defense as the only one without a timetable. ● The plan revives a project the Constitutional Court struck down in October 2004, ruling that Seoul's status as capital is part of an unwritten customary constitution. ● Institutions will move into leased private buildings rather than wait for new complexes, after the first relocation round took more than seven years to get underway. 2026-09-03 16:12:15 -
S. Korea targets physical AI, expert warns against imitation SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - South Korea can reach the top tier of physical artificial intelligence by pairing its factory base with the data those factories generate, Prime Minister Han Seong-sook told a technology forum in Seoul on Wednesday. Physical AI refers to systems that act in the world rather than on a screen, driving robots, machines and vehicles through real space. It is the industry's next frontier after generative AI, and the competition for it has pulled in national governments. "If semiconductors are the brain of AI, physical AI is the body that moves in the real world, and the heart supporting all of it is the AI data center," Han said. The government intends to link the three through a set of mega-projects so that each one feeds the others. She pointed to the San Francisco AI Declaration that President Lee Jae Myung issued in July during a trip to the United States and South America, which set out a plan to make South Korea a global production base for AI and a core link in the AI supply chain. Movement and process data logged on Korean factory floors, combined with the manufacturers already using it, is the government's answer to the question of what South Korea brings that its rivals do not. The forum, the 2026 GGGF, opened Wednesday at The Plaza in central Seoul and runs through Friday under the theme "KOREA, State of AI." Aju News Corporation hosts it with the Global Economic and Financial Research Institute. Roughly 200 lawmakers, academics, students and industry executives attended the opening, where National Assembly Speaker Cho Jung-sik also spoke. The keynote went to Dennis Hong, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of its Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, known as RoMeLa, on whether AI civilization arrives at all without physical AI competitiveness. Hong had made his case days earlier in an interview ahead of the forum, and it cuts against the ambition the government laid out from the same stage. The United States holds the software ecosystem and the capital. China holds supply chain scale, price and the speed to mass-produce. South Korea loses if it competes on either. "What matters in physical AI is iteration speed, actually building robots, deploying them, getting data, learning, then building better robots," he said. Not who designs the best brain or body, he added, but who evolves fastest. He named semiconductors, automobiles, batteries, electronics and precision manufacturing as the base South Korea already has, and warned against the alternative. "We should not get into a numbers race, building the same humanoids just because the United States and China are building humanoids," Hong said. Samsung, Hyundai Motor and LG hold something the internet cannot supply, which is data from real production sites, and the companies best placed to use it are the ones that already own the plants, the products and the customers. Two problems sit in the way. Workers asked to teach their skills to a machine have no guarantee the job survives the lesson, and no country has settled who owns the resulting data or how its value gets shared. Hong said rules on ownership, consent and compensation need to come first. He was also blunt about the gap between what physical AI demonstrates and what it delivers. "Succeeding once in a demonstration and running reliably in the field all day are completely different problems," he said. "Technological progress and a bubble exist at the same time." 2026-09-02 17:31:56 -
Kazakhstan offers to host SCO Development Bank headquarters SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - A development bank that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has not yet agreed to create already has a country volunteering to house it. Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Heads of State in Bishkek on Sept. 1 that Kazakhstan would take the lender and its headquarters if the bloc's members reached agreement on building it. He backed the proposal, which China has pushed, and said the money should go first to infrastructure, technology and industrial projects. "And if the member states reach consensus, Kazakhstan could host this institution, its headquarters," the Kazakh president said. The bank does not exist yet. Tokayev attached his offer to a condition the bloc has not met, and the leaders left Bishkek without a founding document for the institution. The SCO groups 10 member states, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and four Central Asian countries, and has run for a quarter century without a development lender of its own. Tokayev built the offer on trade numbers. He said commerce among SCO countries was approaching $1 trillion, then argued that the bloc's economic connections still fall well short of what its members could manage together. Kazakhstan wants what he called a broad SCO trade and investment space with minimal barriers, digital procedures and developed transport and logistics links. To get there, he proposed a workaround for the bloc's habit of moving at the pace of its slowest member. "We propose introducing a mechanism of pilot industrial consortia, which will allow states to carry out projects as they become ready for them, without waiting for all participants to join," he said. "Successful undertakings can be scaled up across the whole Organization." He also proposed launching SCO cross-border trade zones on the basis of existing border cooperation centers, describing them as a testing ground for simplified goods exchange, digital customs procedures and modern settlement mechanisms. Transport came next, and here Kazakhstan has the most direct stake. The country sits on the overland routes between China and Europe, and Tokayev listed the Belt and Road Initiative, the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route and the North-South corridor as networks the SCO should knit together. He asked members to build a single digital transit platform that would follow cargo from departure point to final recipient, and to adopt a Transport Connectivity Strategy of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization through 2035. On technology, Tokayev argued that artificial intelligence is moving too fast for member states to simply adapt to it. He said SCO countries should shift from trading experience to building technology together, and proposed a network of AI centers under SCO auspices drawing on member states' universities, research institutions and technology companies. Kazakhstan already signed on to a parallel Chinese project in this area. On July 16 in Shanghai, it became one of 29 founding members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, an intergovernmental body headquartered in the Chinese city and created on Beijing's initiative to set common approaches to AI governance. Security occupied the first section of his speech. Tokayev proposed an SCO ministerial conference on strategic stability and confidence-building measures in Eurasia, with an agenda covering the reduction of military risks, restraint of a new arms race, and the prevention of dangerous incidents. He warned that the effects of armed conflict are no longer contained where the fighting happens. "Of particular concern is the fact that the consequences of armed conflicts are already spreading beyond the immediate combat zones, affecting international markets, commercial shipping and the stability of energy and transport links," he said. Kazakhstan backed the aims of two bodies the bloc is standing up, the SCO Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats and the SCO Anti-Drug Center, saying their work would lift coordination among member states' agencies to a different level. Tokayev also asked that the question of reforming the SCO be handed to member states' foreign ministries. The session continued in the SCO Plus format, where Tokayev turned to the wider international system and made an unusual argument for a leader in that room. He defended the United Nations. "A good deal of criticism is directed at the U.N.," he said. "Even if this criticism is partly justified, it does not cancel out the main point, that there is no alternative to this Organization." He said the U.N. Charter should remain the universal foundation of international law, praised Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for defending it, and said the reform Guterres began would succeed only if member states supplied the political will. Tokayev then made a case for countries in Kazakhstan's own weight class. Responsible middle powers, he said, can broker between competing centers of power and should have their positions reflected in global governance mechanisms. He pointed to Kazakhstan's decision in July to join the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation, another Chinese initiative, as evidence of that approach. He proposed fixing the SCO's core principles in a special U.N. General Assembly resolution timed to the International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace. Water took up the longest passage of the second speech. Tokayev said dozens of U.N. structures handle water issues without any single intergovernmental organization holding a comprehensive mandate, and repeated Kazakhstan's call for an International Water Organization under U.N. auspices, with an SCO water analysis center as its regional counterpart. On technology governance, he cited a project already approved. The Asia-Pacific Digital Solutions Center for Sustainable Development, established in Almaty on Kazakhstan's initiative under the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, should help spread working digital solutions to developing countries, he said. He used the SCO Plus floor to report on changes at home, telling the leaders that Kazakhstan's new constitution took effect July 1 and that a new unicameral legislature, the Kurultai, has begun work. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev also addressed the session. The leaders closed the meeting by signing the Bishkek Declaration marking the organization's 25th anniversary, along with decisions approving the regulations of the SCO Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats and the executive committee of the SCO Anti-Drug Center. No document establishing the development bank was among them. 2026-09-02 17:00:59 -
Kookmin University grabs 10th Formula Student Korea win SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - Two electric race cars built by undergraduates finished first and second at South Korea's biggest student car-building competition last weekend, giving Kookmin University a 10th straight overall title in the event's Formula division. About 1,800 students from 43 universities competed at Formula Student Korea 2026, which ran from Aug. 27 to 30 at the Korea Automotive Technology Institute's vehicle and driver safety research center in Yeonggwang County, Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City. The Korean Society of Automotive Engineers organized the event with the institute. The overall title went to KEF-26, one of two cars entered by the university's student car-building club, Kookmin Racing. The team also received an award from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources. The club's second car, F-26, took gold in the electric formula class. The competition has run every year since 2007. Teams spend roughly a year designing and fabricating a single-seat open-wheel car, and judges score both the quality of the design and how well the students can account for the choices they made. The cars then run timed events measuring acceleration, cornering and durability. The Korean Society of Automotive Engineers (KSAE) frames the event as workforce training. Students who finish a car have worked through suspension geometry, battery packaging, and manufacturing cost, the kind of full-vehicle problem that engineers at automakers rarely touch in their first years on the job. KSAE gives its top award, the KSAE Grand Prix Formula, to the team with the highest combined score across every event. Rain fell through the driving events. KEF-26 placed at or near the top of all of them and completed the endurance race with the fastest lap time in the field. Kookmin teams also swept the individual awards for acceleration, for the skidpad, a figure-eight course that measures how much cornering grip a car can hold, and for the written design report. Formula Student Korea accepts both combustion and electric entries. Kookmin ran two electric cars this year, as it did in 2025, the first season the club fielded a pair of them. F-26 had already been on track this summer. At Formula SAE Electric, run by SAE International from June 16 to 20 at Michigan International Speedway, the car finished eighth overall in a field of about 100 university teams. It placed third in the endurance event, ninth in the skidpad and 11th in autocross, and reached the design final, where it finished 12th. It was only Kookmin's second entry in the electric class. That left the club about nine weeks between Michigan and Yeonggwang. "There was a lot of pressure in preparing for the domestic competition right after the world event," said Cho Hyun-sung, an automotive engineering student who managed the F-26 project. "Winning the overall title for a 10th straight year and raising Kookmin University's standing makes me proud." Shin Sung-hwan, dean of the university's College of Automotive and Mobility and the club's faculty adviser, said the streak reflects both the students' work and sustained backing from the university, and pledged continued support for training engineers who will lead the future auto industry. Kookmin Racing was founded in 2001. Its best result at Formula SAE remains a fourth-place finish in 2015, the highest placing by an Asian team that year. 2026-09-02 15:55:51 -
KAIST LED mask quadruples skin injection gains SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - A wearable LED mask that conforms to the face's contours has made a common dermatology injection about four times more effective at restoring skin elasticity in a clinical trial. This result points to home beauty devices as a way to carry the benefit of a clinic visit into daily use, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science said Wednesday. According to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the project was led by Lee Keon-jae, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and was carried out with researchers at the cosmetics group Amorepacific. The researchers found that deep skin elasticity improved by 12.8 percent on the side of the face that received both the injection and the mask, compared with 3.1 percent on the side treated with the injection alone. Thirty-three people took part, using the mask on one side of the face for eight weeks. Home skin care devices have sold well in South Korea and abroad, but the rigid LED masks on the market cannot press against the nose and the hollows under the eyes at the same time. Wherever a gap opens between the light and the skin, more of the light reflects away, and heat that pools in one spot raises the risk of a low-temperature burn. The mask tested here has two parts. Thousands of tiny LEDs sit under a diffusing layer so that light leaves the device as an even sheet rather than a scatter of bright points, and the whole panel rests on a three-dimensional elastic frame whose sections move independently to follow the nose, the cheeks and the jaw. That frame lifted the share of the mask in contact with skin to 78.1 percent from 46.9 percent and cut the distance between the light source and the skin to 1.8 millimeters. Across eight measurement points on the face, the red light arrived at 93.83 percent uniformity. In a 2024 study, a KAIST team reported that the same class of mask improved deep skin elasticity by as much as 340 percent compared with conventional LED masks. The new trial extends the work to skin brightening and to what happens after a needle procedure. The injection used in the trial delivers polynucleotide, a DNA-derived material, into the dermis, the layer beneath the skin's surface that holds the collagen and elastic fibers responsible for firmness. Dermatologists use it to prompt regeneration, and it has become one of the more popular treatments in South Korean clinics. On its own it has no established effect on skin tone. Every participant received the injection across the entire face. The mask went on one side only, a design known as a split-face trial, which lets researchers compare two treatments on the same person and remove differences in individual skin type from the result. No group used the mask without the injection, so the trial measures what the light adds rather than what it does alone. The mask side scored better on all five brightening measures the team tracked, covering skin brightness, evenness of tone, dead skin buildup, and the number and area of melasma patches, the brown discoloration that spreads across cheeks and foreheads with sun exposure and hormonal change. Skin tissue taken from human donors and treated in the laboratory showed the same pattern. Expression of MITF and TYR, two markers that govern how much melanin skin cells produce, fell in the tissue exposed to the LEDs, and new collagen formation ran about 15 percent higher than with the injection alone. The light itself was red, at a wavelength of 630 nanometers, or 630 billionths of a meter. The researchers attribute the effect to mitochondria, the structures inside cells that generate energy, which respond to red light by producing more ATP, the compound cells burn to repair and rebuild tissue. Recovery after the needle went faster as well. Three days on, water loss through the skin had dropped 20.8 percent on the mask side against 12.4 percent on the other, a sign that the skin barrier had rebuilt more quickly, and redness was lower. "This study confirms clinically that a home LED mask can go beyond regeneration to deliver a brightening effect, and it shows how much it matters to press the light against the skin," Lee said. He added that he expects the approach to grow into a platform linking clinic treatment to home care. Amorepacific, whose researcher is a co-corresponding author on the paper, plans to bring a product based on the technology to Japan in the fourth quarter of this year and the United States in the first quarter of 2027. Journal/Source: Nano Energy Title: Clinical validation of skin brightening and rejuvenation enabled by a skin-conformable surface-emitting micro-LED mask with injection Link/DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2026.112288 2026-09-02 14:16:13 -
S. Korea builds armored ambulance for combat evacuation SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - South Korea has completed development of an armored ambulance built to reach wounded soldiers in areas its current field ambulances cannot enter. Hyundai Rotem said Tuesday it had finished system development of the vehicle under a program run by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA). Design, prototype construction, and test and evaluation were carried out with domestic technology over about two years beginning in 2024. The program cost 14.5 billion won ($10.6 million). The vehicle carries wounded soldiers from the front line to hospitals in the rear, and medics can treat them during the drive. South Korea has been doing that work with the military's standard-issue ambulance and with commercial ambulances. DAPA said both have low mobility and are limited in protection, rough-terrain performance, and cross-country driving, which left them unable to support evacuation close to combat units. That gap matters most for mechanized formations and amphibious landing forces, which push deep into enemy-held ground on offensive maneuvers. DAPA said casualties in those units need evacuation support that can come to them, and it set the standard at treatment within 60 minutes of injury, the interval known as the golden hour. The new vehicle is built on the wheeled command post vehicle, a design already in South Korean service with proven protection and mobility. Hyundai Rotem said it chose that platform because its interior is taller than a standard wheeled armored vehicle, giving enough room for medical equipment and for medics to work. With two medics aboard, the vehicle carries up to six walking wounded or four patients on litters. The compartment holds a litter loading device that moves a patient in and out lying flat, an oxygen supply, an automated external defibrillator, patient monitoring equipment, and a stock of medicines. High-intensity light-emitting diode (LED) lamps in the ceiling light the space. Medical personnel can treat a patient while the vehicle is moving and can draw on remote medical support during the run. The vehicle keeps its interior at a pressure above the outside air to block contaminated air from entering, a measure against chemical and biological attack. DAPA said the vehicle will also be used to evacuate civilian casualties from disaster sites that ordinary vehicles cannot reach. The armored ambulance adds to Hyundai Rotem's wheeled armored vehicle line, which was designed in modules so variants can be built for different missions. The wheeled command post vehicle came out of the same approach. Hyundai Rotem said the completed vehicle should let the military move field casualties more safely and quickly, and that the company would "lead innovation in defense technology that can protect the safety and lives of the public as well as military personnel." DAPA has begun preparing for mass production and said it aims to deliver on schedule. Ko Hyung-seok, the Army brigadier general who heads the agency's maneuver systems bureau, said the vehicle combines mobility, protection and medical equipment in a way that makes it "a core capability for preserving our military's combat power." "We will push ahead with mass production and field deployment without setbacks, so that soldiers can carry out their missions under the firm protection of the state," he said. 2026-09-02 10:21:03 -
Kookmin signs Qatar deal on carbon market training for students SEOUL, September 01 (AJP) - Students from five South Korean universities will train inside the international carbon market under an agreement signed Tuesday in Seoul, opening a route into a Qatari crediting program whose credits airlines buy to meet United Nations emissions obligations. That program, the Global Carbon Council, won full approval from the International Civil Aviation Organization in October 2024 to supply credits under the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, the U.N. body's global offsetting system for air travel. In May it added eligibility under the Core Carbon Principles set by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. The council says it is the only carbon crediting program based in the Global South holding both accreditations. What makes the arrangement unusual is who is being sent. The consortium that signed the deal is funded under a Ministry of Education program for humanities and social sciences students, not for engineers or climate scientists. The agreement was signed at Kookmin University's main administration building by the environment consortium of the Humanities Utmost Sharing System, a program run by the ministry and the National Research Foundation of Korea that pays universities to build joint degree tracks across institutional and departmental lines. Kookmin leads the consortium, which was selected in the program's environment category. Officials from the four other member universities attended, those being Duksung Women's University, University of Ulsan, Inha University and Chosun University. Carbon markets reward a humanities background more than the label suggests. A carbon credit represents one ton of greenhouse gas emissions reduced or removed, and its price depends less on the technology behind the reduction than on whether the reduction can be verified, whether it would have happened anyway, and whether two countries have both claimed it. Those are questions of rule-writing, auditing, contract law and public policy. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, named in the agreement as one of the training areas, governs how countries trade emissions reductions among themselves and count them toward national targets. Its operating rules were settled only at the 2024 U.N. climate conference in Baku, after years of deadlock over double counting, and the market built on them is still taking shape. The other party is the Gulf Organization for Research and Development, a Doha non-profit established in 2009 by Yousef Alhorr at Qatar Science and Technology Park and held under Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company. Its work runs from applied research in carbon, energy efficiency, renewable energy and water to professional training and carbon neutrality advisory services, framed around Qatar National Vision 2030, the development plan the government launched in 2008. The Gulf Organization for Research and Development (GORD) also operates the Global Sustainability Assessment System, a green building rating scheme adopted this year as the regional Gulf standard. Every stadium built for the 2022 World Cup was certified under it. The carbon council began in 2016 as the Global Carbon Trust and is one of two affiliates GORD operates alongside its accreditation bureau. Under the agreement the two sides will expand training and practical experience in the voluntary carbon market and Article 6, run teaching and research exchanges with GORD and Qatari universities, link student research and startup projects in climate technology, and build career networks in the Middle East. Internships and hands-on programs tied to the carbon council sit at the center of the plan. Kookmin said it expected students to see the international carbon market directly and build professional skills through them, and that cooperation would later widen to Qatari universities and related bodies through joint teaching programs, research and overseas links for student ventures in climate technology. Qatar has been building climate technology into a national strategic industry, and Kookmin cast the agreement as a way both to widen student access to the region and to push South Korean environmental teaching and research outward. The environment consortium works under the theme of coexistence and shared growth in an age of climate crisis, developing coursework that crosses departments and campuses so that students trained in the humanities and social sciences can read environmental problems through those disciplines and propose workable answers. Kookmin has designated water, energy and environment as one of eight fields marked for concentrated investment under its long-term development strategy, KMU VISION 2035: EDGE. 2026-09-01 17:53:44 -
Airbility raises 6.5 billion won to shoot down drones with drones SEOUL, September 01 (AJP) - A Seoul aerospace startup has closed a Series A round to build small aircraft that hunt other aircraft, betting that the cheapest way to stop an incoming attack drone is another drone rather than a missile. Airbility said Tuesday that the 6.5 billion won ($4.7 million) round was led by Sazze Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, with existing backer Stonebridge Ventures returning and the Industrial Bank of Korea joining as a new shareholder. Cumulative funding now stands at 10.5 billion won. The company declined to disclose its valuation. The round lands in the middle of the largest funding boom the defense technology sector has seen. Defense tech startups raised $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2026 alone, already ahead of the full-year record of $9.6 billion set in 2025. Airbility builds what the industry calls air-to-air hard kill, meaning an interceptor aircraft physically strikes or captures a hostile drone in flight rather than jamming its signal. Soft-kill methods fail against drones that fly preprogrammed routes and never need to talk to an operator. Three interceptors are planned. In the company's account, the AB-U10 fires a net at its target at speeds up to 180 kilometers per hour, the AB-U2 is a payload-sized drone carried aloft by a larger mothership aircraft and released to strike directly, and the AB-U4L is a fixed-wing model launched from a tube at up to 300 kilometers per hour. All three sit on the same high-speed electric vertical takeoff and landing platform, an airframe that rises like a helicopter and then transitions to winged forward flight. Airbility said the AB-U10 will reach the market by the end of this year and the other two in the first half of 2027. The economics are the pitch. In Ukraine, air defense crews have repeatedly spent multimillion-dollar surface-to-air missiles on Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones that cost a small fraction of that. Airbility puts the Shahed at roughly $35,000 a unit against about $4 million for a Patriot missile, and says a single engagement using its method costs between $50 and $3,000. The company argues the same arithmetic works abroad. Foreign systems from suppliers such as Anduril of the United States face origin controls and procurement reviews that slow deliveries, Airbility said, while the AB series is built on Korean technology, can be sold into a wider set of countries and is priced at roughly one-tenth of the alternatives. Discussions are under way with more than nine countries across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America, according to the company, with four memorandums of understanding and two joint ventures in progress. The engineering comes out of South Korea's state weapons laboratory. Airbility was founded in November 2023 by researchers from the Agency for Defense Development who led work on domestic aircraft including the T-50 supersonic trainer and the KF-21 fighter, together with staff from Hyundai Motor and LG Electronics. Of 26 employees, 80 percent work in research and development. In December 2025 the company said it flew three prototypes through transition, the passage from vertical lift into winged flight and the hardest phase of an eVTOL envelope to prove. Government money has followed. Airbility was recently selected for the Korea AeroSpace Administration's 2026 Scale-up TIPS program, worth 3 billion won in research funding, and is building a domestic record through projects with the Marine Corps and the Defense Acquisition Program Administration. Sazze Partners has invested in more than 100 artificial intelligence, software and consumer companies since 2018, including the South Korean AI firm Upstage. Airbility said the round is the firm's first investment in defense. "What caught our attention was a company solving the cost asymmetry problem in the counter-drone market, where blocking a single drone can cost hundreds of times more than the drone itself," said Lee Ki-ha, managing partner at Sazze Partners. "If they can convert the rapidly rising global demand for counter-drone systems into contracts, we expect them to grow into a company that represents South Korea's defense sector." Co-chief executive Lee Jin-mo said the goal is to widen the business from selling airframes to selling integrated systems and to reach 50 billion won in cumulative revenue by 2028. South Korea's defense industry has crossed $10 billion in annual orders, and the government has made becoming one of the world's four largest arms exporters a national policy goal. Anduril closed a $5 billion Series H in May at a $61 billion valuation, and Shield AI raised at $12.7 billion in March. Airbility has raised 10.5 billion won since it was founded. 2026-09-01 17:23:19