Kakao is strengthening its industry-academia cooperation network to advance its services by sharing the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and research results with researchers at major South Korean universities.

Kakao said on May 27 it held the academic exchange program Kanana Scholar Colloquium on May 22 at Kakao's AI Campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province.

Kanana Scholar is an AI cooperation program Kakao launched in March, with 7 professors in AI and computing at major South Korean universities serving as advisers. The event was set up to share Kakao's AI technology and research direction with academia and expand intellectual exchange between industry and universities.

At the event, Kakao introduced its in-house research on advancing its models. It shared research directions and service application cases in key areas including the Kanana foundation model, agentic AI, multimodal models and AI safety, and discussed opportunities for cooperation with academia.

In a poster session, researchers from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Seoul National University, Yonsei University and Hanyang University, affiliated with the Kanana Scholar advisory professors, presented the latest research results on large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI. The presentation topics included improving inference efficiency and reliability for LLM agents, strengthening multimodal AI safety, federated learning-based model personalisation, understanding extremely long-form videos, real-time lip-sync generation, and 3D vision and human-object interaction modelling.

A Kakao official said the colloquium was a forum for Kakao AI researchers and academic researchers to share the latest AI technologies and research results and discuss cooperation opportunities. The official said Kakao will continue to expand exchanges with academia through Kanana Scholar and strengthen the competitiveness of its AI technology and services.