Korea-US Emerging Tech Conference at UCLA Samueli Promotes Bilateral Collaboration

The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, together with the Republic of Korea Consulate in Los Angeles, welcomed tech sector leaders, researchers and policy experts to campus Nov. 22 for a half-day symposium. 

Held in the William M.W. Mong Memorial Learning Center, the Korea-U.S. Emerging Tech Conference featured more than a dozen speakers from academia and industry. The symposium focused on current and emerging advanced technologies in the U.S. and South Korea as well as areas in which tech leaders from both countries can collaborate.

Los Angeles County has the largest Korean community outside of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, while UCLA has the largest number of students reporting Korean heritage of any UC campus. South Korea ranks third at UCLA as a country of origin for its foreign students, including 40% of the graduate cohort who study in the engineering or computer science disciplines. 

Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of Engineering at UCLA, kicked off the event with welcome remarks. She shared that the symposium came about through conversations earlier in the year with Youngwan Kim, consul general for the consulate. As a global research university, she said, UCLA is a natural starting point to explore where the two countries can work together.

“There are questions that one expertise area cannot answer,” Park said. “That’s why we continue to think about how to come up with a common vocabulary to communicate with one another. This will really allow us to work together on a common goal and work with each other to have even more synergy.”

“I would like to ask all of you to help our partnership grow even stronger,” said Consul General Youngwan Kim of the Republic of Korea in Los Angeles. “Whether you are in academia or in business, you are the key to our cooperation and to our future.”

In his opening remarks, Kim emphasized the strong ties between South Korea and the U.S., noting the two countries share many of the same values and focus on the increasingly intertwined areas of security, technology and the economy. He touched on Korea’s success in space exploration and praised the unique leadership role California plays in artificial intelligence, space and sustainable technologies, combined with policies that support investment and growth in those areas.

“I would like to ask all of you to help our partnership grow even stronger. Whether you are in academia or in business, you are the key to our cooperation and to our future,” said Kim, who began his current post in 2022 following a career spanning three decades at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including posts in New York, Washington, D.C. and Baghdad.

Attended by nearly 100 participants, the conference featured three panel discussions, with the first one on artificial intelligence and robotics. Four panelists spoke: Nathan Hillson, lead principal investigator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Agile BioFoundry; Alan Ho, CEO of quantum startup Qolab; UCLA Samueli mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Dennis Hong, who directs the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa); and Seong-Hyok Sean Kim, a vice president and senior research fellow at LG Electronics. UCLA computer science professor and graduate programs vice chair Miryung Kim, whose expertise includes software systems and AI, presented her research and moderated the discussion.

The second session covered climate change and clean energy. Panelists were Clara Gillispie, an advisor at the American non-profit National Bureau of Asian Research; UCLA Samueli chemical and biomolecular engineering and bioengineering assistant professor Junyoung Park, who specializes in systems biology and metabolic engineering; UCLA Samueli chemical and biomolecular engineering associate professor and undergraduate education vice chair Dante Simonetti, who serves as associate director for technology translation at UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management; and Nathan Hillson, who participated in his second panel of the afternoon. Dean Park, whose research focuses on carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies, shared her research and moderated the discussion.

The symposium’s final panel covered aerospace and space engineering. Panelists at this session were Jamie Bock, a Caltech professor and principal investigator on NASA’s SPHEREx mission, which is mapping the sky in near-infrared spectroscopy; Woong-Seob Jeong, who leads the Korean consortium on SPHEREx; and Yoonjin Won, an associate professor at the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering who works on optimizing energy harvesting, manufacturing processes and electronics cooling. The session was moderated by Xiaolin Zhong, professor and chair of the UCLA Samueli Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, who studies hypersonic flows.

Following the remarks and panels, Hong led a lab demonstration highlighting some of the robots developed in RoMeLa before a networking reception where attendees shared ideas on next steps in strengthening bilateral collaboration.