Ministry of Education announced the 4th Industrial Revolution Leader Universities, which are to receive aids from the Ministry in a new program as a part of the Ministry’s Society-Optimized Industry-Academy Cooperation Leader University project (or ‘LINC+’).

The Ministry announced 10 universities as these Leader Universities after the final round of evaluation among the applicant universities for the LINC+ 4th Industrial Revolution Leader Universities. They included our School of Engineering/Department of Robot Engineering consortium. The Ministry also included at least one university in each of the five regions of the country. These 10 Innovation Leader Universities are now eligible to a new grant, which amounts to 1 billion won to each university. This grant will be used to train our future talents who will lead the new industrial fields of the future, such as smart health care, autonomous vehicles, IoT, augmented reality and virtual reality, smart factory, and artificial intelligence robot, etc.

This year is the first year of the LINC+ Innovation Leader University Program, which 49 universities applied. The applicant universities went through a documentary evaluation process (1st round) and an interview round (2nd round), before the LINC+ Project Management Committee made the final call to decide the eligible universities. The Evaluation Committee consisted of the experts from academic communities, research communities, and industries. They evaluated the application documents submitted by the universities and selected down the candidates to a list of 15 universities which participated in the 2nd round of evaluation in which they gave presentation and went through a discussion assessment to be the final 10 universities.