Park Se-woong (박세웅), a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University, has taken office as the 11th president of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI).

ETRI held an inauguration ceremony for Park on May 20 at the main auditorium in Building 7 on its campus. In his inaugural address, Park presented a vision of “ETRI opening a warm world where people live together through AI and DX innovation”. He said ETRI will serve as an innovation engine for national intelligence as a full-cycle AI and ICT R&D platform, while leading sustainable growth based on human-centred values.

Park stressed key priorities to realise national intelligence: strengthening national mission-oriented R&D; developing and standardising core technologies for AI-native 6G and satellite communications; focusing on strategic areas such as safe AGI, sovereign AI and on-device AI; expanding research on immersive spatial media and physical AI; and implementing AI and DX in the public and industrial sectors.

For management innovation, he said ETRI will pursue measures including operating the Borderless Player (BP) project to lower barriers between departments; creating a creative, challenge-oriented research environment where failures also become assets; shifting to high value-added IP management; expanding open R&D cooperation with universities, government-funded research institutes and industry; and strengthening regional shared-growth cooperation platforms based on regional research headquarters.

Park, born in 1962, graduated from Seoul National University’s Department of Electrical Engineering in 1984, earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the same university in 1986, and received a doctorate in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States in 1991. He worked as a senior researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories and has served as a professor at Seoul National University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 1994.