Qualcomm is moving to identify research capabilities among South Korean science and engineering graduate students. Qualcomm Technologies Inc. said on Tuesday it is recruiting domestic graduate students to take part in the academic paper competition "Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2026".

Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea is an academic paper competition that supports research activities by science and engineering talent in South Korea. Qualcomm encourages graduate students to produce results with innovation, execution and teamwork as its core values. It has held the competition every year since 2020 to promote the AI ecosystem and the development of future technologies.

This year’s paper topics are edge AI, which processes AI computation on the device itself, autonomous driving, and agentic AI, which performs tasks by making its own decisions. Graduate students pursuing master's or doctoral degrees at South Korean universities in the 2025 to 2026 academic year can apply. Applicants can choose one of the three topics and submit a research paper. The deadline is Aug. 15. Participants can exchange views with Qualcomm researchers during the programme and receive advice on paper topics and ideas.

Outstanding papers that pass the first round of screening by Qualcomm’s evaluation panel will take part in presentations and a poster session. Evaluations will be based on the innovativeness and creativity of the idea, understanding of the research, experimental results and the potential for further research. Up to 30 teams can pass the first screening. Qualcomm plans to select up to 15 final winning teams in November and deliver 4 million won in scholarships per team to their schools.

Sangpyo Kim (김상표), president of Qualcomm Korea, said "Qualcomm provides diverse technical content and programmes across IoT, AI, compute, XR and data centre workloads to expand the global edge AI developer ecosystem. It also focuses on identifying, supporting and mentoring master's and doctoral students across a broad range of technical research fields through the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, based on the core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. We hope this programme will help graduate students make a leap toward achieving their research goals."