South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT held an event on Nov. 13 in Seoul with the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) to share results from an integrated bachelor's-master's ICT core talent training programme.

The event was organised to share curriculum operations and outstanding research and development results from the programme. Under the ICT core talent training programme, companies and universities jointly develop research and education curricula for master's and doctoral students and run a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum that also allows undergraduate students to participate.

The ministry provides up to 250 million won per project a year for as long as five years. This year, 46 projects are being run at 23 universities nationwide. From the programme's launch in 2020 through last year, a total of 730 courses were developed and operated in ICT fields including AI, AI semiconductors, cybersecurity and digital convergence. Some 1,266 master's and doctoral students completed the curriculum, producing research results including 525 SCI-level papers and 579 patent applications.

At the event, 3 students who produced outstanding research results received 1 deputy prime minister's award and 2 IITP president's awards.

Yun-mo Jeon (전윤모), a Dongguk University student who received the deputy prime minister's award, participated in a "software-oriented ship" research and education curriculum, developed integrated control software for heterogeneous simulators and published an SCI-level paper. Yi-hyun Kim (김이현), a Korea University student, developed a depression prediction model based on a multimodal large language model (LLM). Yoo-bin Lee (이유빈), a Sungkyunkwan University student, received an IITP president's award for achievements including emotion recognition and LLM agent development.

The ministry also introduced awards this year for research teams that operated outstanding research and education curricula. A research team led by Dongguk University professor Dong-woo Kim (김동우) received the deputy prime minister's award, while teams led by Sungkyunkwan University professor Eun-il Park (박은일) and Chonnam National University professor Seung-chan Lee (이승찬) each received an IITP president's award.

The ministry plans to expand support aligned with young talent's growth stages, from credit-linked internships at the undergraduate level to specialised graduate education and global joint research. It will continue to promote the training of ICT professionals with practical capabilities by strengthening links between education and research based on industry-academia cooperation.