South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT launched a "special achievement bonus" scheme and selected 4 people with outstanding results, holding an awards ceremony on Monday. The awards followed President Lee Jae-myung’s instruction to provide unconventional rewards to public officials who deliver outstanding results.

After an evaluation involving internal and private-sector members, the ministry selected Lee Hyun-woo and Jang Gi-cheol from its headquarters, and Jeon Seung-hoon and Kim Mi-young from the Postal Service as recipients.

The ministry awarded Lee as the main contributor and Jang as the supporting contributor for helping strengthen the foundations of an independent AI ecosystem. It granted Lee 10 million won and Jang 3.5 million won in bonus payments.

They were highly evaluated for raising overseas assessment rankings for domestic AI models through the "independent AI foundation model" project. They were also credited with officially announcing a plan to secure more than 50,000 government GPUs and drawing private-sector participation.

They also contributed to strengthening the competitiveness of the cloud industry through a comprehensive overhaul of the cloud strategy for the AI era. Their achievements were also recognised for planning and officially launching a national AI research hub in Yangjae, Seoul, and the Global AI Frontier Lab in New York. In particular, the project contributed significantly to the ministry receiving an "excellent" grade in the government work evaluation.

Jeon and Kim at the Postal Service were recognised for responding quickly to a fire at a state-affairs resource and restoring postal and post office financial services early. The ministry also paid 10 million won to Jeon as the main contributor and 3.5 million won to Kim as the supporting contributor.

Jeon managed postal information systems and worked to minimise damage through rapid situation assessments and strategic decision-making. Even when immediate recovery was impossible due to system loss during the fire, he decided to urgently activate the old computing system and chose a "pre-open, post-recovery" strategy, preventing paralysis of the national postal logistics network ahead of the Chuseok holiday.

It also protected about 160 trillion won in national assets by halting the system in advance, considering the possibility of damage to finance-related hardware.

Kim supported headquarters decision-making on operating the old computing system through rapid and broad technical and risk reviews, and later took full responsibility for data and system recovery. In particular, she helped urgently develop 277 tasks built in a cloud environment, including prepaid customs duties for international mail to the United States, on the old computing system, contributing to normalising the postal system.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon (배경훈) said the awards were intended to spread a culture in which public officials proactively practise innovation, beyond simply rewarding results. He said the ministry would continue to generate innovative policy outcomes that the public can feel through fair evaluations and unconventional rewards.