Kyungil University (President, Hyun Tae Chung) announced that the Departments of Electronic Engineering and Architecture have been selected as URPs (Undergraduate Research Programs) by the Ministry of Education and KOFAC (Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity).

This program is the research-assisted project to provide undergraduate students in science and engineering majors with research capability of science and convergence and to give them opportunity to do self-initiated research. The Ministry of Education and KOFAC invited public participation in issues with two divisions, the basic research field and the science/ convergence field. As a result, 90 research issues in total were selected by all of the universities in the nation, and they selected the two teams of Department of Electronic Engineering, ‘Research of Free Space Optics Relay Communication-based Physics Measurement Security (Gun-Mo Park (senior), Han-Wha Seok (junior), Eun-Sun Chang (sophomore), and Gyu-Sung Whang (advisor))’ and of Department of Architecture, ‘Research of Digital Conservation of Architectural Cultural Assets (Hong-Whan Lee (senior), Cheong-Whan Kim/ Cheong-Mook Yu (junors), and Seung-Hak Woo (advisor)’ in Kyungil University.

The two research teams will conduct the research projects with the assistance of government research funds of 9 million won and 7 million won respectively for the upcoming 6 months. During this period of time, the students are supposed to improve self-initiated research ability and make creative research outcomes. Later they are going to publish the research outcomes in journal associations registered in the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), and the two advisory professors are planning to advise their students to publish SCI-level articles.

Professor, Gyu-Sung Whang from the Department of Electronic Engineering said that the selected issues this year were cut in half as compared with last year and that this opportunity will dramatically enhance undergraduate students’ research capacities by doing research for themselves in the team and obtaining time for recent research topics.