Korean
President Shin Shares Innovation Strategy at Moscow
(President Shin engages in discussion during the Island 10-22 Conference held at Skoltech in Moscow.) President Sung-Chul Shin shared the recipe for success for rapid national development through university education during the Island 10-22 Conference held at the Skolov Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow on July 16. President Shin stressed how urgent it is for higher education to rapidly embrace the new global economic environment brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution in his keynote address entitled ‘Roles and Responsibilities of Universities for Rapid National Development’. The Island 10-22 Conference is a summit co-organized by the National University of Science and Technology MISIS and University of the National Technological Initiative 2035 and supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. More than 30 world-renowned experts, presidents of leading technological universities including President Peretz Lavie from the Israel Institute of Technology Technion, President Scott Pulsipher from Western Governors University and specialists in big data participated in the conference as speakers and discussed a diverse spectrum of ideas for making innovations and digital transformations in universities. More than 1,600 participants joined the conference. During his keynote speech, President Shin explained how Korea has achieved such rapid economic growth over the past half century. He cited the Korean government’s vision and innovation policies as factors leading to Korea’s phenomenal success. KAIST, one of the results of the Korean government’s innovation policy, led the nation to advanced technological breakthroughs in industries such as semiconductors. Such visionary policies and investments in science, technology, and education eventually made the Korea of today possible. President Shin said that KAIST distinguished itself through its new vision of C3 that fosters intellectual creativity, caring for others, and a challenging mind . Under Vision 2031, a blueprint for becoming a leading global university, President Shin said the KAIST continues to strive for innovations in convergent education,research and entreprenurship.
It’s a Blessing: Lawyer Couple Donates 82 Acres of Land
(From right: International IP Alternative Dispute Resolution Center (IIPAC) Chairman Kim Cheol-ho, his wife Korea Abraham Lincoln Society Founder Kwak Sung-hyun, President Shin and Mrs Shin) Korea Abraham Lincoln Society Founder Kwak Sung-hyun and International IP Alternative Dispute Resolution Center (IIPAC) Chairman Kim Cheol-ho have committed to donate a large tract of land to KAIST during a ceremony on July 3. The couple will donate about 82 acres of land located in Seongnam City, Gyeonggi Province. The value of the property is estimated at over 10 billion won. Kim, a lawyer who taught at the Moon Soul Graduate School of Future Strategy from 2009 to 2014, said, “It is a real blessing to make a gift to KAIST." The property is a part of family inheritance that has been passed down for generations. “We’ve thought about the right way to give back to society from a long-term perspective. KAIST will be the best place to honor my father’s generosity and spirit to help young students,” Kwak said at the ceremony. Kwak’s late father who was also a lawyer was a big landowner in Seongnam City back in the 1970s. But he also had to buy nearby parcels of land because he could not refuse the local farmers asking him to buy their land when they urgently needed to sell their property to pay their children’s college tuition fees. So, he bought the land, paying more than double the asking price. The couple finalized their donation plan after having a meeting with President Sung-Chul Shin earlier this year. President Shin personally guided them on a campus tour and presented his vision to make KAIST a world-class university. “We were quite moved by President Shin and the faculty members’ passion and hard work. And we really wanted to help KAIST be the real top university in the world by educating young talents needed for the new era,” Kim said. President Shin said the university will use the land to establish a new campus for entrepreneurship that combines education, research, and technology commercialization so that it can become an advance base in the Fourth Industrial Revolution era.
Class of ’79 Donates 2 Billion KRW at Homecoming Event
The class of 1979 held a reunion on May 25 at the College of Business at the KAIST Seoul campus, which was the main campus when they were students 40 years ago. These leaders, who now serve in diverse sectors of academia, research, business, and industry both in Korea and abroad, held a homecoming event in celebration of the 40th anniversary of their graduation. At the event, Chairman Chong-Don Kim of Miwon Commercial, who was representing their class, donated 2 billion KRW toward the KAIST development fund. Chairman Kim reminisced saying, “Today’s event takes my friends and I back in time and reminds us of our old school days here at KAIST. It means a lot to us to re-visit the campus with grateful hearts for our alma mater.” He continued, “We raised this fund in the spirit of ‘Honor KAIST’, hoping for KAIST to continue to grow towards its vision of becoming a world-leading institution. Our class always has and forever will dearly support KAIST with all our hearts.” ‘Honor KAIST’ is an alumni-led spontaneous donation campaign first initiated in 2015 by the class of ’75, the first group of masters students who graduated from KAIST, with the aim of raising 1 trillion KRW fund for the development of KAIST. President Sung-Chul Shin responded, “The deep contributions and consistent engagement being made by our alumni groups for KAIST’s institutional growth is truly beneficial, far beyond what meets the eye. The entire school would like to express our sincere gratitude to the class of ’79 for your generous donation which will serve as a run-up for the university's many future initiatives.” More than 100 graduates and emeritus professors including Professor Jae-Kyoon Kim and Professor Choong-Ki Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering, as well as Chairman of the KAIST Alumni Association Dr. Ki-Chul Cha, were able to attend.
‘Think Out of the Box,’ Team Circos Wins the P4G Innovation ..
(The winning team of the P4G Innovation Sprint poses with the Crown Prince of Denmark (sixth from the left row and President Shin (fifth from the left row) during the awarding ceremony.) Team Circos from KAIST and Denmark made a new sustainable business model for Hempel, a global coating supplier group in Denmark, and won the first prize at the P4G (the Partnership for Green Growth and Global Goals) Innovation Sprint held at KAIST’s Seoul campus on May 22. The six-member team was awarded one million KRW in prize money by the Crown Prince of Denmark. Two of winning team members have the privilege of traveling to visit Hempel in Denmark. The winning team thought outside the box, inspired by box wine which reduced the sales price from traditional bottled wine. Six teams made up of members from different academic disciplines spent two nights and three days brainstorming ways to resolve the challenges of corporations such as Velux and Hempel from Denmark and SK from Korea. The P4G Innovation Sprint is one of the events co-hosted by KAIST and Technological University of Denmark in celebration of the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations establishment between Denmark and Korea and the 8th anniversary of the Green Growth Alliance between the two countries. The Crown Prince Couple also made a royal visit to Korea in honor of the 60th anniversary celebration and Green Growth Alliance between the two countries. This Innovation Sprint aimed to develop young academics’ perspectives, skills, and talents for the next generation to better research the Sustainable Development Goals set by UN. Three teams made their final five-minute pitches before the Crown Prince and President Sung-Chul Shin and responded to questions from the four-member jury. The Crown Prince of Denmark and President Shin both agreed that the collaborative and convergent ideas will address global problems. The Crown Prince stressed in his congratulatory remarks the importance of partnership in this polarizing world to achieve sustainable improvements saying, “Partnerships are only possible to sustain through collaboration and hard work while staying curious, creative, and critical. " He also shared the special relationship with KAIST. His father-in-law Professor John Donaldson used to be a visiting professor of applied mathmatics at KAIST back in 2003. President Shin added, “Collaboration across boundaries is most critical for responding to these issues. In that sense, this P4G Innovation Sprint is a shining example for demonstrating the collaborative efforts between teammates from diverse disciplines. When we work together and build convergent ideas, we will be more innovative and go further.” (Winning team member Nicolai Thorball from DTU pitches at the final in the presence of the Crown Prince of Denmark and KAIST President Shin.) “The canned packaging in the paint industry results in 40 times more carbon emission in the course of production. However, when using aluminum packaging which is recyclable, the waste amount will be cut dramatically,” pitched Nicolai Thorball from DTU on exchange at Seoul National University. Nicolai, whose major is environmental engineering, is one of two Danish students including Thomsen Xandra Flyvbjerg from the University of Southern Denmark. Flyvbjergy, majoring in business, is now on exchange at Sungkynkwan University. “I am very glad to have the chance to understand the concept of the circular economy and green growth at the sprint. It was also very challenging to make ideation from so many ideas brainstormed,” said Dong-Eun Lee, a KAIST undergraduate from the Department of Biological Sciences. He said that he learned a lot from his two other teammates who are from the Program of Green Business & Policy at KAIST College of Business, Jae-Hee Park and Kyung-Hyun Kim. Circos’ solution for a sustainable model received acclaim from the jury members. DTU Senior Vice President Marianne Thellerson, one of jurors, claimed their model has very high market feasibility, saying, “Their idea could be commercialized right now into the market.” Professor Hee-Kyung Park from KAIST who helped participants’ ideation as one of four mentors said, “The winning team perfectly met all the components of the evaluation criteria, Solution, Acceleration, and Pitch.” At this sprint, 10 students from Denmark and 29 KAIST students were divided into 6 teams and given the challenges of three companies. The Danish window facility company Velux presented its future glass window system and the paint company Hempel their circular economic new business model. SK challenged the students to help it become a global clean energy solution company. The event was based on a hacker blueprint that found the optimal solution to the topics proposed.
Professor Park at UPC-Barcelona Tech Receives Jong-Hoon Cho ..
(From left; Chan-Ho Song from KNUHS, PhD candidate Sang-Woo Chung at KAIST, Professor Hyuk Park at UPC-Barcelona Tech, and Eun-Hee Kang at Korea University) Professor Hyuk Park was honored to be the recipient of the Jong-Hoon Cho Award which was presented at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Barcelona Tech. The award recognizes young scientists in the field of aerospace engineering. Professor Park, a graduate of KAIST’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2001, earned his MS and PhD at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, and works at the Castelldefels School of Telecommunications and Aerospace Engineering at UPC-Barcelona Tech. He won this year’s award, which honors former PhD candidate Jong-Hoon Cho at the Aerospace Engineering Department who died in a lab accident in 2003. Professor Park also received 25 million KRW prize money. Cho’s family endowed the award and scholarship in his memory. Since 2005, the scholarship has selected three young scholars every year who specialize in aerospace engineering from Cho’s alma maters of KAIST, Korea University, and Kongju National University High School. Professor Park was selected as this year’s awardee in recognition of his studies of synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellite radiometer system, remote sensing radio frequency interference reduction system development, and 3CAT series research. The Award Committee also chose three students for scholarships: PhD candidate Sang-Woo Chung from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at KAIST with 4 million KRW, PhD candidate Eun-Hee Kang from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Korea University with 4 million KRW, and Chan-Ho Song from Kongju National University High School with 3 million KRW.
Education Innovation Day Reaffirms Rewarding of Excellence
(Professor Lee makes an presentation after accepting the Linkgenesis Best Teacher Award.) Professors Tae-Eog Lee and Il-Chul Moon from the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering received the Linkgenesis Best Teacher Award and the Soo-Young Lee Teaching Innovation Award on May 10. They were each awarded with 10 million KRW in prize money during the Education Innovation Day ceremony held at the Chung Kun-mo conference hall. The award was endowed by KAIST Alumni Scholarship Chairman Hyung-Kyu Lim and KAIST Foundation Chairman Soo-Young Lee to support the innovation initiative and acknowledge faculty members who made significant contributions to educational innovation and benefited the general public though their innovations. “KAIST’s vision for excellence and commitment to innovation is a game changer. Educational innovation is one of five pillars of Vision 2031, and it is our priority to foster critical and creative thinking students,” said President Sung-Chul Shin at the ceremony. All the awardees made presentation on their innovative projects and shared their ideas on better pedagogical methodology for next generation. Professor Lee, dean of the KAIST Academy and the head of the Center for Excellence in Learning & Teaching was recognized for his contribution to enhancing educational quality through innovative learning and teaching methodology development. He has set up an Education 3.0 Initiative, an online education platform for flipped learning at KAIST. Professor Moon also upgraded the online education platform to the 4.0 version and extended KAIST’s massive online courses through KOOC framework. This open platform offers more than 62 courses, with more than 170 thousand users registered since 2014. Professor Song-Hong Park from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering and Professor Jae-Woo Lee from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering also won the Excellence Award.
Research Day Highlights Most Outstanding Research Achievemen..
(Professor Cho, the grand research prize awardee makes a special lecture on the Research Day on April 23.) Professor Byung Jin Cho from the School of Electrical Engineering was selected as the Grand Research Prize Winner in recognition of his innovative research achievement in the fields of nano electric and flexible energy devices during the 2019 KAIST Research Day ceremony held on April 23 at the Chung Kunmo Conference Hall. The ten most outstanding research achievements from the past year were also awarded in the three areas of Research, Innovation, Convergence Researches. Professor Cho is an internationally recognized researcher in the field of future nano and energy device technology. Professor Cho’s team has continued to research on advanced CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductors). CMOS has become his key research topic over the past three decades. In 2014, he developed a glass fabric-based thermoelectric generator, which is extremely light and flexible and produces electricity from the heat of the human body. It is so flexible that the allowable bending radius of the generator is as low as 20 mm. There are no changes in performance even if the generator bends upward and downward for up to 120 cycles. His wearable thermoelectric generator was selected as one of the top ten most promising digital technologies by the Netexplo Forum in 2015. He now is working on high-performance and ultra-flexible CMOS IC for biomedical applications, expanding his scope to thermal haptic technology in VR using graphene-CMOS hybrid integrated circuits; to self-powered wireless sensor nodes and self-powered ECG system using wearable thermoelectric generators . In his special lecture at the ceremony, Professor Cho stressed the importance of collaboration in making scientific research and presented how he moved to future devices after focusing on scaling the devices. “When I started the research on semiconductors, I focused on how to scale the device down as much as possible. For decades, we have conducted a number of procedures to produce tiny but efficient materials. Now we have shifted to develop flexible thermoelements and wearable devices,” said Professor Cho. “We all thought the scaling down is the only way to create value-added technological breakthroughs. Now, the devices have been scaled down to 7nm and will go down to 5 nm soon. Over the past few years, I think we have gone through all the possible technological breakthroughs for reducing the size to 5nm. The semiconductor devices are made of more 1 billion transistors and go through 1,000 technological processes. So, there won’t be any possible way for a single genius to make a huge breakthrough. Without collaboration with others, it is nearly impossible to make any new technological breakthroughs.” Professor Cho has published more than 240 papers in renowned academic journals and presented more than 300 papers at academic conferences. He has also registered approximately 50 patents in the field of semiconductor device technology. The top ten research highlights of 2018 as follows: - Rydberg-Atom Quantum Simulator Development by Professor Jaewook Ahn and Heung-Sun Sim from the Department of Physics - From C-H to C-C Bonds at Room Temperature by Professor Mu-Hyun Baik from the Department of Chemistry - The Role of Rodlike Counterions on the Interactions of DNAs by Professor Yong Woon Kim of the Graduate School of Nanoscience and Technology - The Medal Preoptic Area Induces Hunting-Like Behaviors to Target Objects and Prey by Professor Daesoo Kim from the Department of Biological Sciences - Identification of the Origin of Brain Tumors and New Therapeutic Strategy by Professor Jeong Ho Lee from the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering - The Linear Frequency Conversion of Light at a Spatiotemporal Boundary by Professor Bumki Min from the Department of Mechanical Engineering - An Industrial Grade Flexible Transparent Force Touch Sensor by Professor Jun-Bo Yoon from the School of Electrical Engineering - The Detection and Clustering of Mixed-Type Defect Patterns in Wafer Bin Maps by Professor Heeyoung Kim from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering - The Development of a Reconfigurable Spin-Based Logic Device by Professor Byong-Guk Park from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering - The Development of a Miniaturized X-Ray Tube Based on Carbon Nanotube and Electronic Brachytherapy Device by Professor Sung Oh Cho from the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering Professor YongKeun Park from the Department of Physics and Professor In-Chel Park from the School of Electrical Engineering received the Research Award. For the Innovation Award, Professor Munchurl Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering was the recipient and the Convergence Research Awards was conferred to Professor Sung-Yool Choi from the School of Electrical Engineering, Professor Sung Gap Im from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Professor SangHee Park from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering during the ceremony. For more on KAIST’s Top Research Achievements and Highlight of 2018, please refer to the attached below. click
KAIST-THE Innovation & Impact Summit Touts New Roles of High..
Global leaders from 115 institutions across 35 countries reaffirmed that the roles of universities are evolving to become much broader and more diverse, and redefined the impact of higher education last week at KAIST. During the THE Innovation and Impact Summit hosted by KAIST in partnership with the Times Higher Education, global leaders in higher education, industry, and government all agreed that universities should respond better in order to have a lasting and sustainable impact on society. In an effort to encourage social responsibility and boost the impact of universities, the THE first launched the University Impact Rankings based on the Sustainable Developed Goals declared during the 2015 UN summit. The THE’s University Impact Rankings are the first global attempt to evaluate universities’ impact on society, rather than only focusing on research and teaching performance. The new metrics include universities’ policies and outcomes based on 11 of the 17 UN SDGs. More than 500 institutions from 75 countries submitted data for the new rankings. The top three scores from ten of the SDGs were combined with SDG 17 to calculate the final score. The University of Auckland placed first in this new ranking while KAIST ranked fourth in the category of SDG 9 on Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure. President Shin said, “KAIST has dedicated itself to producing knowledge that could serve as a growth engine for national development over the past half century. Now, taking on the UN’s 17 SDGs as new indicators, we will do our utmost to become a leading university in creating global value and better serving the world.” (Phil Baty, chief knowledge officer of THE) Phil Baty, chief knowledge officer at THE said, “I would like to applaud KAIST for being a pioneer, taking a new way of looking at university excellence. KAIST’s performance was strong overall, but especially outstanding in SDG 9. Its data proves that the university is fully engaged in knowledge creation and entrepreneur activities.” Keynote speakers all shared their views on disruptive knowledge and how to adjust to the new AI technology-driven, socio-economic culture. (from left: Lino Guzzella, former ETH Zurich President and Sung-Chul Shin, KAIST President) Lino Guzzella, former ETH Zurich President, argued in his keynote speech that there has been amazing growth in university enrollments, coupled with a substantial mismatch between what universities teach and what society needs. He went on to say that universities should look beyond the classical university model and find a way to train the next generation in a way that ensures society has a role for them. “The likelihood of each generation having a higher income at the age of 30 than their parents has diminished dramatically,” he said. He provided data that showed that middle-income professions have been declining, and between 2000 and 2010 the number of very high-skilled jobs and very low-skilled jobs doubled, whereas the number of those in the middle increased far more slowly. He expected that this trend will continue, saying that universities should focus on instilling critical thinking, interdisciplinary studies, and ‘productive failure’ to students in the new era. He also shared the secret recipe for the reduced youth unemployment statistics in Switzerland. He said that the education system in Switzerland was designed so that only 20 percent of an age cohort undertakes a classical university education, while 80 percent do vocational training run by companies. They learn what is really needed by industry and society from the early stages of their careers, so no mismatch exists. (Young Suk Chi, chairman of Elsevier) Meanwhile, Young Suk Chi, chairman of Elsevier, claimed in his keynote speech that universities should stop evaluating researchers only on their publication and citation counts. He said that doing so was driving academics to turn out multiple papers based on a single study in a practice called ‘salami publishing.’ Chi said, “It’s a responsibility we bear together, and we certainly, as industry associates, have to work hard to educate the world that publishing isn’t everything, but the impact is. But the impact is not just citations, either.” Chi said that there is a global ‘tech-lash’ that has arisen due to falling trust in major IT companies. On the other hand, universities are trustworthy. People perceive that universities are not merely seeking profits, and they can take advantage of it for fostering next generation researchers and CEOs, which can stand for ‘Chief Ethics Officers’. “Universities are collaborative,” said Chi. Universities’ research will flourish with more collaboration at a global scale. Collaborative research shows higher citation and impact rates. Instead of competing against one another, universities and industries should collaborate for advancing research. He argued further saying, “If they can uphold this reputation, universities, not companies, will be the institutions that people trust to influence and educate the next generation. Universities, in contrast to industry, have long-term vision, can facilitate collaborative research, and are trustworthy.” (President Joseph Aoun, Northeastern University) In the last day’s keynote speech, President Joseph Aoun of Northeastern University said that higher education risks becoming obsolete if it does not fully embrace lifelong learning. He also talked about preparing learners to succeed in the AI age. He said that lifelong learners made up 74 percent of learners in the US, and only 34 percent of universities in the country fill their seats, but higher education has not yet incorporated lifelong learning as part of its core mission. He said that lifelong learning is going to require that we listen to the needs of society, of both individuals and organizations. He also called for institutions to create curricula based on what he termed ‘humanics’ – the integration of technological literacy, data literacy, and human literacy, and said that this should be combined with experiential learning. (from left: So Young Kim, Guohua Chen, Aqil Jamal, Mooyoung Jung and Max Lu) (from left: Hubo and Duncan Ross, chief data officer of THE)
KAIST 2019 Commencement at a Glance
(KAIST 2019 Commencement Ceremony) This year, KAIST awarded a total of 2,705 degrees: 654 PhD degrees, 1,255 master’s degrees, and 796 bachelor’s degrees. Including this year’s numbers, KAIST has conferred a total of 63,830 degrees since its foundation in 1971. Parents, family, and friends came to campus to congratulate the graduates with big smiles and hugs. Faculty and staff members also attended the ceremony to celebrate their graduation. This year, distinguished guests including National Assembly Member Kyung-Jin Kim and Vice Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation Dae-sik came to celebrate the day with the KAIST community. During the commencement, KAIST also announced the recipients of its undergraduate academic awards. The Minister of Science and ICT Award was won by Do-Yoon Kim from the Department of Aerospace Engineering, the KAIST Board of Trustee Chairperson Award went to Se-rin Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the KAIST Presidential Award was won by Hee-Ju Kim from the Department of Physics, the KAIST Alumni Association President Award went to Hyeon-Seong Park from the School of Electrical Engineering, and finally the KAIST Development Foundation Chairperson Award was won by Gyeong-Hoon Lee from the Department of Mathematical Sciences. This year’s valedictorian Eun-Seok Jeong from the School of Computing said, “I believe that we are able to stand here today because we challenged ourselves to confront our shortcomings and our uncertainty. If we continue to develop, we will become a better person than we were yesterday.” (KAIST President Sung-Chul Shin and Woo-Seok Jeong, '19 PhD in Aerospace Engineering) As a KAIST alumnus and fellow scientist, President Sung-Chul Shin offered his congratulations and emphasized that graduates should continue to pursue the C³ spirit. “In this age of great transformation, embrace challenges and exercise creativity as you have learnt through your education and research at KAIST. And keep in mind the importance of caring for others. Please remember that challenge and creativity will have more meaning if rendered with a caring spirit,” he said.
KAIST and LG Electronics Team up for 6G Wireless Communicati..
(LG Electronics CTO Il-Pyung Park (left) and Dean of KAIST Institute Sang Yup Lee) KAIST and LG Electronics are working together to take the lead in next-generation wireless communications and launched the LG-KAIST 6G Research Center on January 28, 2019. KAIST Institute has been focusing on developing a new growth engine for the national economy through interdisciplinary research. In particular, its research work in the field of next-generation wireless communication was listed in the National Research and Development Excellence 100 in 2016 and 2017. LG Electronics has been a global leader in this field for many years. According to TechIPM, the company had the most 4G LTE/LTE-A patents from 2012 to 2016. Also, it first standardized the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything, which is the core technology for autonomous vehicles. The new head of the research center, Professor Dong Ho Cho from the School of Electrical Engineering said, “We will work on developing source technology for sixth generation mobile communications, which will enhance national competence and prepare for the future industries.” CTO of LG Electronics Il-Pyung Park said, “We are hoping to take the lead in the global standardization of sixth generation wireless communications and secure new business opportunities.”
KAIST, College of Engineering website renewal notice
KAIST, College of Engineering website renewal notice Hello, this is College of Engineering, KAIST. We genuinely thank you for visiting our website. Since October 1st, 2018, our website has been restructured. It works with optimal view in mobile as well. English version is expected to open in 2019, as soon as translation is done. If there is any deficiency, we promise to fix it shortly. We aim to further improve our website for rapid and precise information delivery. Thank you.
KAIST Ranks 13th in Engineering and Technology and 43rd in O..
For the first time, the university has broken into the ranks of top 50 global universities since the first release of the rankings in 2004. The 2015 QS World University Rankings were released on September 15, 2015. Overall, KAIST ranked 43rd, advancing eight steps up from last year’s results. Its engineering and technology rank now places it 13th in the global rankings, but it is first in Korea's rankings. Both represent the highest record KAIST has ever attained since the QS Rankings began in 2004. The QS Rankings uses six performance indicators to assess universities’ global reputation, research impact, staffing levels, and international complexion. The indicators are: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), student-to-faculty ratio (20%), number of citations per faculty publications (20%), international to domestic faculty ratio (5%), and international to domestic student ratio (5%). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) topped the 2015 list, with Harvard University coming in second place. The University of Cambridge and Stanford University jointly ranked third. For details on the 2015 QS World University Rankings, see http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/qs-world-university-rankings-201516-out-now.