An international symposium was held to discuss the latest research results and ways to apply them in industry, bringing together AI researchers from South Korea and abroad as well as global companies and research institutions.

The Ministry of Science and ICT and the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) on Thursday held the "Global AI Frontier Symposium 2026" at The Westin Seoul Parnas in Seoul's Gangnam district.

The event is co-hosted by the National AI Research Hub, which brings together national AI research capabilities, and the Global AI Frontier Lab, a global cooperation base. The theme is "AI, beyond intelligence to the real world". It will discuss industry-academia-government cooperation to apply core AI technology research to real industry and daily life.

In the first session, leading AI scholars and representatives of global companies will deliver keynote speeches. Leslie Kaelbling (레슬리 팩 캘블링), the Panasonic Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will present on "rational robots". Noam Brown (노엄 브라운), vice president for research at OpenAI, will look at the direction of AI technology development under the theme "implications of large-scale inference computation".

After the keynote speeches, Kim Ki-eung (김기응), head of the National AI Research Hub and a professor at KAIST, will chair a panel discussion on "Global AI leadership: industry-academia-government cooperation". Participants including Kaelbling and Brown, as well as Kyunghyun Cho (조경현), co-director of the Global AI Frontier Lab and a professor at New York University, and Emily Black (에밀리 블랙), a professor at New York University, will discuss next-generation AI technology development and ways to cooperate in global research.

In the second session, 6 specialist tracks will be run on core AI technologies and industrial application cases. The tracks comprise large language models and agentic AI, multimodal AI, AI for science, physical AI and embodied intelligence, AI for life, and trustworthy, safe and governance AI. Experts from South Korea and abroad will take part as speakers, including LG AI Research head Woo-hyung Lim (임우형), Perplexity Asia head Jun Morita (모리타 준), and Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute head Myung-joo Kim (김명주).

In particular, the event is expected to become a venue for global exchanges as representatives of global AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as researchers from overseas leading research institutions such as France's Prairie Institute and Canada's Vector Institute, will also attend.

Second Vice Minister Ryu Je-myeong (류제명) of the Ministry of Science and ICT said, "This symposium is a venue to draw a blueprint for industry-academia convergence where academia's in-depth core technology research leads to practical application in industrial sites." He added, "We will strengthen the international competitiveness of domestic AI research and step up efforts to build a global AI research cooperation ecosystem."