South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT held the ICT Challenge 2026 awards ceremony and a meeting with winning students on Tuesday with the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) and the University Information and Communications Research Center Council.

The ICT Challenge is a competition in which master's and doctoral students participating in ministry-backed programmes for university ICT research centres, regional intelligent innovation talent development and ICT elite talent development compete on the technical merit, marketability and commercialisation potential of research ideas. Teams of 3 present their ideas and demonstrate their technology.

In its eighth year, the contest drew 206 teams from 84 centres at 39 universities nationwide. Ideas were presented in areas including AI and software, wearable devices, autonomous driving, 6G, biohealth, cybersecurity, semiconductors and agricultural AI.

Thirty-two teams advanced to the finals through preliminary judging. They refined their ideas over about 3 weeks with mentoring from employees of KT and AWS Korea. Sixteen teams were selected as winners through the final evaluation.

POSTECH's InteractX team won with a wearable typing technology that helps text input in virtual and augmented reality environments by using AI to analyse and correct finger movements that differ by user.

Five teams, including InteractX, InhaEYE (Inha University), CVML (Ajou University), Seonje Tonggam (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and BiNeAI (Korea University Sejong), received the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Award. The winning teams will be given the opportunity to attend CES 2027, to be held in Las Vegas in the United States next year.

Five teams that received the IITP President's Award will be given the opportunity to attend the China Hi-Tech Fair (CHTF 2026), scheduled to be held at the end of this year. Six teams that won special prizes will receive prize money of 1.5 million won per team.

The ministry also selected 2 mentors from sponsoring companies who supported the finalists' idea refinement as outstanding mentors and awarded them the Minister of Science and ICT Award and the IITP President's Award, among others.

At the AI and ICT youth talent dialogue meeting held afterward, the winning students shared their experiences participating in the contest and research achievements and discussed difficulties at research sites and directions for supporting young researchers.

Nam Cheol-ki (남철기), director general for software policy at the ministry, said, "The ICT Challenge is an arena of innovative challenge where fresh, on-the-ground research ideas of young researchers develop into research achievements with market impact through expert mentoring." He added, "We will continue to expand the growth foundation so young researchers can strengthen their research capabilities."