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 claims 8th at Formula SAE SEOUL, July 02 (AJP) - Kookmin University's student-run motorsports club finished eighth overall out of roughly 100 teams at the 2026 Formula SAE Electric world championship, delivering the strongest result in the club's short history with an electric race car built entirely by undergraduates. The competition ran from June 16 to 20 at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan, the birthplace of Formula SAE and still its largest venue. SAE International, the professional body that oversees engineering standards across the automotive and aerospace industries, organizes the annual event and this year drew roughly 100 university teams from around the world, according to the organization's own registration records. Teams design, build, and race their own electric formula cars, and are scored across categories that test both engineering rigor and on-track performance. Kookmin University's team, called Kookmin Racing (KORA), entered the competition for only the second time. Its car, the F-26, was built around a goal the team described as stability paired with strong performance across every event on the schedule. That balance showed up most clearly in the Endurance Event, which tests how well a car holds up over a long, demanding run. KORA finished third in that category, aided by fast lap times and a car that held its performance steady from start to finish. The team also placed ninth in the Skidpad Event, which measures a car's cornering grip, and 11th in the Autocross Event, a timed run through a tight course designed to test handling and driver control. In the Design Event, where judges evaluate how well a car was engineered, built, and refined, KORA advanced to the final round and finished 12th. Kookmin University, led by President Jeong Seung-ryul, has been building up its automotive and mobility programs as part of a longer-term academic strategy called KMU VISION 2035: EDGE, which names mobility as one of eight fields the university wants to become known for. The KORA program fits squarely into that push. Students on the team handle every stage of building a race car themselves, from initial design through manufacturing, testing, and on-track troubleshooting, giving them hands-on engineering experience before they graduate. Cho Hyun-sung, a fourth-year automotive engineering student who served as project manager for the F-26 team, said the competition gave the team a chance to prove itself on an international stage. "This competition lets us show the world the quality of Kookmin University's automotive engineering program," Cho said, adding: "It was a valuable experience that broadened our perspective and taught us so much. I am grateful to Kookmin University, our sponsor companies, and every teammate who shared this journey with us." Shin Sung-hwan, dean of Kookmin University's College of Automotive Engineering and Mobility and the club's faculty adviser, framed the result as a marker of how far the young program has come. "I am proud of the KORA students, who competed against leading universities from around the world in the electric formula category and earned an eighth-place finish overall only two years after joining the competition," Shin said. The professor added that he was grateful to the university administration for its support and to the students for their dedication, and vowed to continue working to develop talent for the future of the automotive industry. 2026-07-02 13:54:51 -
China races past Japan, eyes 10 million car exports SEOUL, July 02 (AJP) - China is on pace to export nearly ten million vehicle units this year, according to global consulting firm AlixPartners' 23rd annual Global Automotive Outlook, released June 25. The expected export volume would be a jump from 7.1 million units in 2025, marking the fastest expansion yet for the Chinese automobile industry that, for most of its history, built cars almost entirely for its own drivers. For decades, exports were an afterthought in China's car industry. As recently as 2018, only about three percent of the passenger cars made in the country ever left it, and vehicle exports accounted for less than one percent of China's total export value that year. Throughout the late 2010s, annual exports hovered around one million units, most of them bound for Russia and a handful of other emerging markets. Chinese industry researchers have described the 2009 to 2020 period as a time when carmakers turned inward, not outward, as a fast-growing domestic middle class bought vehicles faster than factories could find buyers abroad. That market trend changed quickly. Exports climbed from roughly one million to two million between 2020 and 2021, then kept accelerating to 3.1 million in 2022, to nearly 5 million in 2023, the year China passed Japan to become the world's largest car exporter, 6.4 million in 2024, and 7.1 million in 2025. If the AlixPartners forecast holds, 2026 would push that trajectory into territory no country has reached before in a single year. Two forces are driving the shift, and both point away from China's home market rather than toward it. The first is domestic overcrowding. China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) data show total vehicle sales inside China fell 2.1 percent in May compared with a year earlier, even as new energy vehicle sales, a category covering both battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars, rose 14.4 percent. Automakers have been cutting prices to hold onto market share in a pattern the industry itself calls involution, a term for competition so intense that companies exhaust themselves fighting over the same customers without growing the overall market. Industry margins in China have been squeezed to around 3.2 percent as a result. The second force is a global one. Oil prices have spiked amid the conflict between the United States and Iran, and the resulting rise in fuel costs has made electric vehicles a more attractive purchase for buyers outside China, particularly in Europe. Morgan Stanley recently raised its 2026 forecast for Chinese EV export growth by 50 percentage points, to 88 percent, citing the energy shock as an offset to soft demand at home. "China's intense local competition and ongoing involution are also expected to drive Chinese automakers to seek growth in new markets," AlixPartners said in its June 25 report. Europe has become the main battleground for that growth. Chinese EV maker BYD's first-quarter sales in Europe more than doubled from a year earlier, Leapmotor's surged more than 800 percent, and a Chery model topped Britain's monthly sales chart for the first time. A pricing agreement between the European Union and China on minimum EV prices, reached in January, has removed some of the uncertainty that had clouded the region for Chinese brands. The export boom has been closely tied to a separate contest playing out between BYD and American EV maker Tesla for the title of the world's top seller of EVs. BYD delivered 557,090 battery-electric vehicles in the second quarter of 2026, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg, while Tesla is expected to report around 396,500 for the same period once it releases official numbers. That reverses the first quarter, when Tesla narrowly reclaimed the lead with 358,023 deliveries against BYD's 310,389, a gap driven mainly by a drop in BYD's domestic sales after Beijing scrapped its EV purchase tax exemption earlier this year. BYD has told analysts it expects overseas sales to reach 1.5 million vehicles in 2026, above its earlier official target of 1.3 million. Chinese automakers are increasingly moving beyond shipping finished cars and building factories overseas instead. AlixPartners forecasts that Chinese brands will boost overseas production to 3.4 million vehicles by 2030, up from 1.2 million last year, with new plants planned in at least sixteen countries. BYD's passenger car plant in Hungary is scheduled to begin mass production in the current quarter, joining existing factories in Thailand and Brazil, with sites in Indonesia and a second European location expected online by April 2026. "It's clear that Chinese automakers and suppliers have even bigger plans in store, starting with more local production," said Andrew Bergbaum, global co-leader of the automotive and industrial practice at AlixPartners. That localization push is already reshaping how global parts suppliers operate. Stephen Dyer, AlixPartners' Asia-Pacific leader for its automotive and industrial practice, said Chinese automakers building or buying capacity abroad tend to bring their own supply base with them. "These Chinese automakers' preference is for their existing supply base, and internal suppliers, to join them abroad," Dyer said, adding that the pattern makes it difficult for traditional suppliers already established in those markets to win new contracts with Chinese customers. BYD's plant in Hungary, once operational, will give the company its fourth overseas manufacturing base after Thailand, Brazil, and a facility already under construction in Indonesia. 2026-07-02 11:03:54 -
KAIST turns Alzheimer's toxin into treatment switch SEOUL, July 02 (AJP) -Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed a drug that activates only inside diseased brain tissue, using a toxic molecule long blamed for worsening Alzheimer's disease as the trigger that switches the treatment on. The molecule is hydrogen peroxide, a reactive form of oxygen that damages cells and builds up at abnormally high levels in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Scientists have traditionally viewed it purely as a threat to be cleared out. The team behind this study flipped that logic, engineering a drug that stays dormant in healthy tissue and only turns active when it encounters the excess hydrogen peroxide found in a diseased brain. In animal testing, mice treated with the compound showed measurable improvements in memory and navigation, offering an early signal for a new approach to dementia treatment. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said in a statement on Thursday that the work was led by chemistry professor Lim Mi-hee and carried out jointly with professor Kim Min-geun from Chonnam National University, along with Lee Cheol-ho and Kim Kyung-sim from the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB), and Lee Young-ho of the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI). The drug belongs to a class called prodrugs, compounds with no therapeutic effect on their own that convert into an active medicine only under specific conditions inside the body. In this case, that condition is direct contact with elevated hydrogen peroxide, effectively turning a marker of disease into the key that unlocks treatment. The result is a compound designed to act like a targeted switch, largely inert in healthy brain tissue and activated only where the disease is already underway. The researchers created two prodrug candidates, named BE-1 and BE-2. In tests, both showed little to no reaction in healthy brain conditions. When exposed to the elevated hydrogen peroxide levels typical of a brain affected by dementia, they converted into active compounds called AP-1 and AP-2. That conversion did two things at once. It reduced hydrogen peroxide and related reactive oxygen molecules, and it interfered with amyloid beta, a protein that accumulates in the brain and damages neurons, from clumping into the large, toxic aggregates considered a central driver of Alzheimer's disease. Using advanced analytical techniques, the team confirmed that the activated compounds altered the structural shape of amyloid beta in a way that blocked it from growing into these larger, more damaging clusters. The team then tested the approach in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. The drug crossed the blood-brain barrier, the protective membrane that controls which substances from the bloodstream are allowed to reach the brain, and converted into its active form once inside. Mice given the drug over an extended period showed reduced oxidative stress in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory, along with lower buildup of amyloid beta. The animals also performed better on behavioral tests measuring their ability to recognize new objects and find their way through mazes, both standard measures of cognitive function in mouse studies. Most existing Alzheimer's drugs are built to target a single protein. The researchers said their approach is different because it uses the diseased environment itself, rather than one specific molecular target, to determine where and when the drug activates. That design, they said, could increase treatment effectiveness while reducing side effects, since the compound remains inactive in healthy tissue. The team also pointed to potential applications beyond Alzheimer's disease, including Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions that involve similar patterns of oxidative stress. Lim Mi-hee, the KAIST chemistry professor who led the research, said in a statement translated from Korean that the significance of the work lies in using hydrogen peroxide, previously treated only as a substance to eliminate, as the signal that activates the drug. She said the technology, which activates medicine only in diseased tissue, is expected to serve as a new platform for treating complex diseases such as Alzheimer's disease more safely and effectively. KAIST doctoral students Lee Ji-min and Hong Eun-seo, both from the university's chemistry department, served as co-first authors of the study. The findings were published online on May 31, 2026, in the journal Small, which ranks in the top 10 percent of chemistry publications by impact factor, under the title "A Prodrug Approach for Activity-Based Chemical Modulation toward Multiple Pathological Targets in Alzheimer's Disease." Reference Information Journal/Source: Small (Impact Factor 12.1, top 10% in chemistry) Title: A Prodrug Approach for Activity-Based Chemical Modulation toward Multiple Pathological Targets in Alzheimer's Disease Link/DOI:10.1002/smll.74013 2026-07-02 10:05:37 -
Kazakhstan's new constitution opens reform era SEOUL, July 01 (AJP) - Kazakhstan's new Constitution entered into force on Wednesday, replacing the charter that had governed the country since 1995 and marking the culmination of a reform process that began nearly four years ago. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in a statement from the presidential office, called the moment "a truly epochal moment" and the start of what he described as a new era of progress, reform, and modernization. The document was approved by referendum on March 15, when, according to official results, close to eighty-seven percent of voters backed the new charter on a turnout of seventy-three percent, the highest for any national vote in Kazakhstan since 2019. It was the fifth referendum the country has held since gaining independence in 1991, and the third focused on constitutional change since 2022. Tokayev signed the document into law two days after the vote, and it consists of a preamble, eleven sections, and 104 articles. Kazakhstan's first post-Soviet constitution, adopted in 1995 under founding president Nursultan Nazarbayev, established a strong presidency and a two-chamber parliament. That system carried Kazakhstan through three decades of rapid economic growth built largely on oil, gas, and mineral wealth, but it also concentrated decision-making power tightly around the presidency. In 2022, following unrest early that year, Tokayev pushed through a first round of amendments intended to loosen that concentration and expand the space for political competition. The Constitution that took effect this week goes considerably further, touching the bulk of the previous text rather than a narrow set of articles. The most visible change is structural. Kazakhstan's parliament, long split between an upper and lower chamber, becomes a single legislative body called the Kurultai, a term drawn from the historical councils once used across the steppe to deliberate and decide matters collectively. Alongside it, the new Constitution creates a vice presidency, a position that did not exist before, and establishes the Halyk Kenesi, or People's Council, a consultative body meant to bring representatives from ethnic and cultural organizations, local governments, and civil society into the policymaking process. Officials in Astana have framed these changes as tools for faster, more accountable governance, replacing an arrangement that often left responsibility for legislative gridlock unclear. Tokayev linked the reform explicitly to national identity as well as institutional design. He tied Constitution Day, now observed each year on March 15, to the start of the Nauryznama decade, connecting the country's spring renewal traditions to a set of stated civic values, among them Law and Order, Diligence and Progress, and Environmental Care. He described the goal as building what the presidential office calls a "Fair Kazakhstan," a state offering equal opportunity and development to all citizens, and said the country's unity as a nation would allow it to compete among the world's advanced states. That last point, competing among advanced states, is where the reform's significance extends beyond Kazakhstan's borders. A more predictable legal framework, with clearer lines of institutional authority, is precisely the kind of signal that trade partners and foreign investors look for when deciding where to commit long-term capital. And few relationships illustrate what is at stake more clearly than the one Kazakhstan has been building with South Korea. The numbers already tell a growing story. Trade between the two countries passed $3 billion in 2025, and South Korean companies have invested a total of $8 billion in Kazakhstan over the past decade, spanning manufacturing, energy, and mechanical engineering. In June, the eleventh meeting of the Kazakhstan-South Korea Joint Commission on Trade, Economic, and Scientific-Technical Cooperation convened in Astana, where officials from both sides discussed a comprehensive economic partnership agreement still under negotiation. "The sides underscored the importance of the Joint Commission," Kazakhstan's state-operated news agency Qazinform reported citing government officials, adding that both countries confirmed their readiness to deepen the partnership and carry joint initiatives forward. Nuclear energy has become one of the more concrete areas of cooperation. Kazakhstan, which holds the world's largest uranium reserves, has been in talks with South Korean partners over the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs), a newer generation of nuclear technology built at a fraction of the size of conventional plants, along with workforce training and a memorandum of understanding still being finalized. Deputy Energy Minister Sanzhar Zharkeshov has called energy a cornerstone of the bilateral relationship, and South Korean firms have also been invited to help modernize Kazakhstan's existing power plants under the country's Electric Power Industry Development Plan through 2035. Critical minerals and rare earth metals, materials essential to batteries, electronics, and clean energy technology, featured prominently in the June discussions as well, with both governments exploring joint processing projects. So did the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, often called the Middle Corridor, a rail and sea network that moves goods from Central Asia across the Caspian Sea toward Europe while bypassing Russian territory. As Kazakhstan continues to build out this corridor, it becomes a more direct link between South Korean industry and European markets, a role few countries in the region are positioned to play. None of this cooperation depends on constitutional reform in a narrow, mechanical sense. But investors and diplomatic partners alike tend to read institutional signals closely, and a government that can point to a rewritten legal foundation, clearer accountability structures, and a stated commitment to the rule of law has an easier case to make at the negotiating table. Tokayev has accepted an invitation to visit Seoul and is expected to take part in the Central Asia-South Korea Summit later this year, a gathering that will bring the region's leaders together with President Lee Jae-myung's government at a moment when Kazakhstan is actively presenting itself as a stable, reform-minded partner. Gabidulla Ospankulov, chairman of Kazakhstan's Investment Committee, described the country's position at a Seoul roundtable in May as Central Asia's largest economy and a transport and logistics hub connecting Asia and Europe. Representatives from Korea Eximbank, Doosan Energy, and other South Korean firms discussed investment opportunities in Kazakhstan directly with the Kazakh delegation, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press service. 2026-07-01 16:52:46 -
KAIST AI reads mouse gestures as language SEOUL, July 01 (AJP) - A research team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has built an artificial intelligence model that treats an animal's body movements the way a language model treats words, and the system used that approach to find, entirely on its own, the core social deficit in a mouse model of autism. The result points toward a new class of AI tool for brain research, one whose reasoning scientists can actually inspect rather than take on faith. The model, called BehaVERT, outperformed the previous best systems on five international benchmarks covering social interaction, multi-animal behavior, three-dimensional motion analysis and autism-related behavior, according to the research team. It was developed by a group under professor Kim Dae-soo in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, with Shin Seung-jae as first author, and the findings were published in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), one of the leading journals in computer vision research, on March 24, 2026. KAIST announced the results on July 1, 2026. Autism spectrum disorder involves a wide range of social and behavioral traits, and researchers have long relied on mutations tied to human cases to build mouse models that mimic those traits in the lab. One such mutation, in a gene called SHANK3, disrupts a protein that anchors connections between brain cells and is linked to roughly 0.5 to 2 percent of autism and intellectual disability cases in humans, according to prior published research. Mice missing this gene show the same pattern seen in some autism patients: their instinct to approach others stays intact, but the quality of their social contact once they get there falls apart. That distinction, subtle and easy to miss with the naked eye, became the test case for what BehaVERT could do. The KAIST team built the model by converting the skeletal movements of a mouse, tracked at the nose, ears, spine, limbs and tail, into tokens, the same kind of basic unit a language model uses to represent a word. Those tokens were then fed into a transformer network built on BERT, an architecture widely used in natural language processing, and trained without being told in advance what any given movement meant. Rather than simply sorting behaviors into preset categories, the researchers said, the model learned to track how the meaning of a movement shifted over time, much as a word's meaning shifts with the sentence around it. When the researchers set BehaVERT loose on a group of mice carrying the Shank3B mutation alongside typical mice, the model zeroed in on one detail: contact between the mouths of two mice during social encounters. It flagged that specific behavior as the clearest marker separating the two groups, a finding that lines up precisely with earlier studies showing that Shank3B mice approach other mice normally but falter in the actual exchange that follows. BehaVERT reached that conclusion without ever being told what autism looks like in a mouse. It found the pattern by watching. The system also lets researchers see its reasoning, rather than simply handing over a verdict. Shin said the project began with a basic question about whether animal movement might carry a structure similar to language. The team trained the model without supplying correct answers in advance, letting it work from behavioral data alone, and found that a version trained on rat movement could be applied successfully to mice as well, a sign that a single model might eventually generalize across species. Kim, the professor who led the study, said BehaVERT goes beyond sorting behavior into categories and can grasp what a behavior actually means. He said the team expects the model to become a core tool for new discoveries across drug development, psychiatric research and behavioral genetics. The KAIST group has built this kind of work before. Kim's lab previously developed AVATAR, a system that reconstructs a mouse's movements in a virtual, three-dimensional space, and spun that technology into a company, Actnova, which now sells automated animal behavior analysis software used in dementia and Parkinson's disease drug research. BehaVERT extends that line of work from tracking motion to interpreting it, a step the researchers describe as a foundation for what they call a behavior foundation model, a general-purpose AI system trainable on one species and adaptable to others. Every author on the BehaVERT paper trained originally in life sciences rather than computer science or engineering, a detail the research team pointed to as evidence that the tools of AI have become accessible enough for biologists to build their own, purpose-built models instead of relying on off-the-shelf systems built for other tasks. "BehaVERT is a new AI model that goes beyond classifying behavior to understanding what that behavior means," Kim said, adding that he expects the tool to drive new discoveries across the life sciences. 2026-07-01 11:22:42 -
Kookmin University hosts global ICT security symposium SEOUL, July 1 (AJP) - Kookmin University will host researchers and industry officials from 11 countries next week week as the school stages the second International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.4 International Symposium, known as EBISION 2026, from July 8 to 10 in Seoul, the university said Tuesday. The conference, held at Kookmin University's main administration building near central Seoul, is the official flagship event of IFIP Working Group 8.4, a research body under the International Federation for Information Processing that focuses on e-business information systems. Delta Electronics, the Taiwan-based power and thermal management company whose annual revenue has climbed past 17 billion dollars on the back of data-center and artificial intelligence demand, will send its chief technology officer, Tei-Wei Kuo, to deliver one of three keynote addresses. The company posted consolidated revenue of NT$554.9 billion in 2025, a 32 percent increase from the previous year, as artificial intelligence-related applications drove exports and investment. Yoo Il-sun, a professor in Kookmin University's Department of Information Security, Cryptology and Mathematics and director of the school's Global ICT Convergence Security Innovation Research Center, serves as general chair of the symposium. The conference will draw participants from South Korea, Denmark, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Greece, Spain, Thailand, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Indonesia, with foreign researchers making up more than 50 percent of presenters, organizers said. A total of 91 papers will be presented over the three days, including 50 oral presentations and 41 poster sessions, covering e-business, ICT convergence, information security and data-driven digital transformation. Three keynote speakers will open the technical program. Tei-Wei Kuo, a former vice president of National Taiwan University who now serves as chief technology officer at Delta Electronics, will speak on the company's research priorities. Nicola Dragoni, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark who leads cybersecurity research across the Nordic region, will present on threats facing networked systems. Antonio F. Skarmeta, a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain who has led major European Union security projects, will round out the keynote sessions. An invited session will feature Manos Varvarigos, vice president of the National Technical University of Athens, who will discuss next-generation network architecture and security for high-performance computing, the powerful clustered systems used for large-scale scientific and artificial intelligence workloads. Speakers in that session are expected to focus on artificial intelligence-driven digital transformation, cyber threat intelligence, data security and trust-based information sharing, themes organizers describe as central to how digital infrastructure will be defended in the coming years. The conference will also include an industry track, where eight companies will present new technologies and demonstrations. KT, the telecommunications carrier that built much of South Korea's wired and wireless network infrastructure, will present its vision for what it calls a four-layer network security architecture designed for the artificial intelligence and quantum computing era. The session is intended to connect academic research with practical industry applications. Other industry participants include ZenmuTech, a Japanese firm specializing in secret-sharing technology, a method of splitting sensitive data into fragments stored separately so that no single breach can expose the full information. Sangfor Technologies, a Chinese cybersecurity and cloud computing firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in Shenzhen, will also take part. Sangfor operates in cybersecurity, cloud computing and enterprise IT infrastructure and is publicly listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The company has built a global footprint of more than 70 branch offices and over 100,000 customers while committing at least 20 percent of its annual revenue to research and development. AI Data Brushing, a Taiwanese security technology firm, will also present. Yoo, the general chair, said the symposium brings together people working at the intersection of business and security research. "EBISION 2026 is a venue where researchers and industry experts in e-business information systems and ICT convergence security gather together to discuss the core issues of the future digital environment," Yoo said. "We hope this conference will serve as an opportunity to showcase South Korea's and Kookmin University's global ICT convergence security research capabilities and expand international industry-academic cooperation networks," he added. 2026-06-30 16:22:30 -
Kazakhstan and Georgia seal strategic Eurasian partnership SEOUL, June 30 (AJP) - Kazakhstan and Georgia signed a strategic partnership in Astana on Monday (local time), tying together a trade route and an oil pipeline that have taken on new weight as Russia's war in Ukraine closes off traditional routes and the war in Iran chokes the Strait of Hormuz. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze signed a Joint Statement along with memoranda on culture, tourism, and digital development, according to Kazakhstan's presidential press service, Akorda. The two leaders discussed trade, investment, and energy cooperation, including Kazakh oil exports through a pipeline that crosses Georgia on its way to the Turkish coast, and agreed to deepen cooperation on the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the "Middle Corridor," linking East Asia to Europe without crossing Russian territory. Transit volume along the route has grown three and a half times over the past five years, the Kazakh presidency said. The Middle Corridor stretches 4,000 kilometers from western China to Eastern Europe through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus, and Turkiye. The corridor only became commercially significant after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when shippers began looking for routes free of sanctions risk and active conflict. Cargo volumes grew 62 percent in 2024 alone, reaching 4.5 million tons, and container traffic rose 37 percent in the first ten months of 2025, hitting 63,300 twenty-foot containers, according to Azerbaijan Railways and the Eurasian Transport Route Association. In April 2026, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkiye signed a joint roadmap aiming for 11 million tons of annual freight by 2030. Georgia sits at the western end of the corridor, where its Black Sea ports serve as the last stop before cargo crosses into Turkiye, while Kazakhstan anchors the eastern end, where its Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk handle the switch from rail to ferry on the way to Baku. The two countries are effectively the bookends of the route. Kazakhstan said that it wants to expand its presence at Georgian ports beyond Batumi to include Poti and Anaklia. Anaklia has long been planned as a deep-water port on Georgia's Black Sea coast, built to handle far larger cargo volumes than the country currently manages. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development estimates that fixing the corridor's bottlenecks will require around 18.5 billion euros ($210.8 billion) in investment. The energy discussions centered on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which runs 1,768 kilometers from Baku in Azerbaijan through Tbilisi in Georgia to the port of Ceyhan on Turkiye's Mediterranean coast. BP operates the Azerbaijani and Georgian sections of the pipeline, which has carried oil since 2006 and has carried Kazakh crude since October 2013. Kazakhstan shipped about 1.4 million tons of oil through the pipeline in 2024 and 1.3 million tons in 2025, according to the Kazakh Ministry of Energy, with plans to reach 1.6 million tons in 2026. That pipeline has gained new importance because of developments in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil trade normally flows. Iran declared the strait closed in early March 2026, after the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, and Iranian forces began attacking ships attempting to pass through it. The International Energy Agency called the resulting disruption the largest the global oil market has ever seen. A memorandum signed by the United States and Iran on June 17 set off a tentative reopening. Still, traffic through the strait remained far below normal when Tokayev and Kobakhidze met in Astana. War-risk insurance for tankers, which cost roughly 0.05 percent of a vessel's value before the war, climbed past 5 percent at the worst of the crisis, pricing most commercial shippers out of the route entirely. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline moves oil overland from landlocked Caspian fields to a Mediterranean port, bypassing the Persian Gulf altogether, which is precisely why it has drawn fresh attention since February. Kazakhstan's long-term goal is to ship 20 million tons of oil a year through the route, though reaching that figure would require substantial new investment in both the pipeline and the Caspian crossing points that feed it. The third agreement signed Monday covers artificial intelligence and digital development, linking Kazakhstan's Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development with Georgia's Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development. Both countries are trying to move beyond the economic models that built them, Kazakhstan beyond oil and Georgia beyond tourism and agriculture, and both have settled on technology as the tool to do it. Kazakhstan established its Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development in 2025, lifting AI policy to the level of a Deputy Prime Minister and signaling how seriously the government takes the shift. That same year the country switched on its first national supercomputer, a machine with two exaflops of processing power and 512 NVIDIA H200 chips, now running the country's national AI platform and its own language models. One of those models, KazLLM, launched in December 2024 after training on 148 billion tokens and was built to operate in both Kazakh and Russian. A new law setting risk-based rules for AI took effect in January 2026. More than 92 percent of Kazakh government services are now handled online, and the country ranks 24th in the world and 10th for online services specifically, in the latest United Nations E-Government survey. Georgia's technology sector has grown faster than its readiness to use AI. Information technology made up just 0.4 percent of Georgia's economy in 2019 but had grown to 5.2 percent by 2023, worth 4.2 billion lari, according to the Policy and Management Consulting Group. Yet only 2.2 percent of Georgian firms had adopted AI as of 2024, according to a UNESCO study, a gap the new memorandum is meant to begin closing. Tokayev closed the visit by awarding Kobakhidze the Order of Dostyk, First Class, an honor Akorda said recognized his role in strengthening ties between the two countries. 2026-06-30 13:43:04 -
Kookmin student wins 2nd at IBM hackathon SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - A student from Kookmin University in Seoul was placed second at the IBM Bob Hackathon on June 11 in a global artificial intelligence competition that drew more than 5,600 participants from around the world and challenged them to build working software in 48 hours, the university announced Monday. Kookmin University (KMU)'s AI Department student Kim Chan-joong competed alone in the hackerthon. The competition, jointly organized by IBM and NativelyAI, the company that runs the AI hackathon platform lablab.ai, received 503 project submissions from 1,672 teams in total. IBM Bob, the tool at the center of the competition, is an AI development agent that works directly inside a software developer's coding environment. Unlike conventional code assistants that respond to isolated queries, Bob reads an entire repository's context, understands developer intent across a codebase, and helps users move from an initial concept to a working application. Kim's submission, a web application named Atlas, targeted a common frustration in software development, which is making sense of an unfamiliar codebase. Large software projects routinely contain hundreds of folders and files, making it difficult for a new developer to grasp the overall structure at a glance. Atlas solves this by rendering a GitHub repository as a city map. GitHub is a widely used platform where developers share and store code publicly. In Atlas, top-level folders appear as color-coded districts. Individual files become buildings, their size determined by the volume of code they contain. Key files are highlighted like landmarks. The tool requires no installation. A user pastes the web address of a public repository into Atlas and the map is generated automatically, with layout calculations processed on the server. The result appears directly in a web browser. The finished map supports zooming, panning, hover tooltips displaying individual file details, and a full-image download. "I wanted to move away from the kinds of topics AI projects tend to gravitate toward and try something fresh," Kim said. "I had always found it took too long to get a sense of how an unfamiliar codebase was organized, and I wanted to solve that discomfort in a way that felt as intuitive as reading a city map." Kim said narrowing the project's scope early was a key factor in the result. "I cut back on ambition and focused on getting the core right. I want to use this experience as a foundation and keep pushing into new territory." 2026-06-29 16:13:30 -
Uzbekistan, Georgia set $1 billion trade target SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - Uzbekistan's President Shavkat Mirziyoyev paid an official visit to Georgia as the two countries pledged to more than triple bilateral trade, from $267.6 million in 2025 to $1 billion. The target is ambitious given where the relationship currently stands. Trade between the two countries tripled between 2017 and 2025, climbing from $89 million, but the flows remain heavily skewed. In 2025, Georgia exported $190.4 million worth of goods to Uzbekistan, more than double the $77.2 million that moved in the other direction. Georgian pharmaceuticals alone, at $89.3 million, were worth more than all of Uzbekistan's exports to Georgia combined. The figures come from analysis published by Uzbekistan's Center for Economic Research and Reforms. The presidential visit follows a trip to Uzbekistan by Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze in March 2025, when he met President Mirziyoyev and Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov. The two sides also held the 10th meeting of their Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, and the billion-dollar target emerged from those talks as the headline commitment. The two countries have held a free trade agreement since 1995. Its practical scope has widened as Uzbekistan's economy has shifted. In the 1990s, Uzbek trade was dominated by raw materials. Today, the country exports copper wire, rolled metal products, electrical equipment, processed food and tobacco, and Tashkent sees Tbilisi as both a market and a bridge to Europe through the South Caucasus and the Black Sea. That is partly what is driving Uzbekistan's investment in the Poti Free Industrial Zone on Georgia's Black Sea coast, where it is building a multi-purpose terminal on up to 30 hectares at a total cost of $18.3 million. The first phase is a cold storage facility rated at 1,000 tons. A 5,000-square-meter covered warehouse follows, then capacity for bulk, oversized and container cargo. The terminal is designed to move Uzbek goods toward European markets and bring European imports back into Central Asia. Poti sits on the Middle Corridor, the trade route connecting Central Asia with Europe via the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and the Black Sea. The route is expected to carry more traffic once construction begins on the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, a long-planned project that would link Uzbekistan directly to China by rail and feed additional cargo westward toward Georgian ports. Investment beyond the terminal has been limited. Total Georgian foreign direct investment in Uzbekistan reached $46 million over the nine years to 2025, spread across 60 registered companies. TBC Bank is the most prominent example of Georgian private capital in the country. The sectors both sides flagged as priorities are ones where the gap between current trade and potential is widest. Georgia imports around $539 million worth of textiles annually and $150 million worth of leather and footwear, most of it from other markets. Electrical goods represent another opening, with Georgia bringing in roughly $300 million a year in cables, transformers and household appliances. In pharmaceuticals, the two sides discussed easing the registration of Uzbek medicines in Georgia and establishing joint production facilities with Georgian distributors. A joint working group under the trade and economy ministries of both countries has been established to translate the commitments from the presidential visit into specific investment and infrastructure projects. 2026-06-29 14:07:53 -
KAIST appoints Bae Choong-sik as 18th president SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has appointed Bae Choong-sik, a mechanical engineering professor and specialist in carbon-neutral propulsion technology, as its 18th president, following a vote by the university's board of directors on Monday. The board, chaired by Kim Myung-ja, met at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology's (KAIST) Seoul campus in Gangnam District to make the selection. Founded in 1971 as South Korea's first research-oriented science and engineering university, KAIST is ranked 65th globally in the QS World University Rankings and enrolls around 10,000 students across its main campus in the central city of Daejeon, roughly 150 kilometers south of Seoul, and a secondary campus in the capital. Bae joined KAIST as a faculty member in 1998 and has built his career around clean combustion systems and low-emission propulsion technologies, areas that have taken on added urgency as South Korea works toward its carbon-neutrality targets. He holds a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Seoul National University and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London. Within the university, Bae has served as head of the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as dean of the College of Engineering. He was also named a Korea Electric Power Corporation Chair Professor, a designation reserved for faculty whose contributions to energy research and education are considered exceptional. His record extends beyond research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bae led the Science and Technology New Deal Task Force for Pandemic Response, an initiative that mobilized South Korea's scientific research capacity to support national crisis management. He has also served as chairman of the Carbon-Neutral Fuel Technology Research Society, where he has helped shape government policy on energy transition and future propulsion systems. Bae has additionally held an advisory role with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, chairing the Climate Division of the Science and Technology Diplomacy Advisory Committee, a position that places him at the intersection of environmental science and international relations at a time when energy policy has become a defining issue in diplomacy. The Society of Automotive Engineers, a global professional organization for mobility and propulsion engineers, named Bae the first Korean to receive the designation of SAE Fellow in the powertrain division, its highest individual honor. He has also received two SAE best paper awards. In South Korea, he received a Presidential Commendation in 2021 and a National Assembly Merit Award in 2024 for contributions to the automotive industry and national competitiveness. The appointment is not yet final. Bae must receive the consent of the Minister of Education and the formal approval of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT before taking office as KAIST's 18th president. 2026-06-29 13:55:42