Seoul National University’s College of Engineering announced that its Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Department Chair: Professor Yongtaek Hong) received multiple awards at the 32nd Samsung Humantech Paper Awards, including the Special Prize and Gold Prize in the university category. The Samsung Humantech Paper Awards is an event hosted by Samsung Electronics and jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Science and ICT and JoongAng Ilbo.

Established in 1994, the Samsung Humantech Paper Awards is a prestigious academic event designed to discover and foster outstanding talent—from high school through graduate school, both in Korea and abroad—poised to lead 21st-century science and technology. This year, a record-high 3,172 abstracts were submitted, and 120 teams were selected as final awardees.

Continuing its strong track record, SNU ECE students received a total of seven awards this year, including two Gold Prizes. In particular, by earning the Special Prize awarded to the department with the most awards in the university division for the third consecutive year, the ECE Department once again demonstrated that it possesses research competitiveness at the highest national level and remains a leading force in Korea’s electrical and computer engineering fields.

This achievement reflects not only the excellence of individual students but also the department’s collective research capacity. Securing the top departmental distinction for three consecutive years underscores the sustained and systematic cultivation of research excellence and talent development within the department.

The Samsung Humantech Paper Awards consist of individual prizes for researchers and special prizes awarded to universities and academic advisors demonstrating exceptional research outcomes.

This year, students from the laboratories of Professors Jinho Lee, Saewoong Bahk, Woo-Seok Choi, Kyunghan Lee, and Jaehyouk Choi delivered particularly outstanding results. Among the five divisions related to electrical and computer engineering, the department secured Gold Prizes in ‘Communication & Networks’ and ‘Signal Processing’, as well as Silver Prizes in ‘Circuit Design’ and ‘Computer Science & Engineering’. These achievements highlight not only the breadth of research output across the discipline but also its top-tier qualitative excellence, underscoring the department’s leading competitiveness in the field of electrical and computer engineering.

Kanghyun Choi (Advisor: Prof. Jinho Lee) received the Gold Prize in the Signal Processing division for proposing FALQON, a novel framework that eliminates the overhead incurred during LoRA fine-tuning with FP8 quantization, achieving up to a threefold improvement in training speed.

Goodsol Lee (Advisors: Prof. Saewoong Bahk and Prof. Kyunghan Lee) was awarded the Gold Prize in the Communication & Networks division for developing QCON, a RAN scheduling technique that maximizes Quality of Experience (QoE) for real-time video streaming by leveraging the multi-connectivity feature of existing commercial 5G networks at no additional cost. The approach was experimentally validated on an Open-RAN testbed.

In addition, Kahyun Kim (Advisor: Prof. Woo-Seok Choi) and Hongsun Jang (Advisor: Prof. Jinho Lee) received Silver Prizes; Chanjeong Park (Advisor: Prof. Kyunghan Lee) received a Bronze Prize; and Junseok Lee (Advisor: Prof. Jaehyouk Choi) and Gibum Park (Advisor: Prof. Kyunghan Lee) were awarded Encouragement Awards.

Professor Yongtaek Hong, Chair of the ECE Department, stated, “Being selected as the department with the most awards in the university category for three consecutive years is the result of our students’ exceptional research capabilities, the dedicated mentorship of our faculty, and the department’s robust research support system. We will continue to encourage creative and ambitious research while fostering world-class research talent.”

Detailed award information is as follows.

Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57524

Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr