Sudang Foundation, the scholarship foundation of Samyang Group, said on the 28th it selected Hwang Il-doo, Seokcheon Chair Professor in the Department of Life Sciences at Pohang University of Science and Technology, and Cho Sung-bae, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yonsei University, as winners of the 35th Sudang Award.
The Sudang Award is an academic prize established in 1973 to honor the late Kim Yeon-su, founder of Samyang Corp., and his commitment to national industrial development and nurturing talent. Each year, two researchers who have contributed to academic advancement in South Korea are chosen to receive a plaque and 200 million won in prize money each. The awards ceremony will be held May 27 at Lotte Hotel Seoul.
Hwang, the basic science winner, was recognized for achievements in plant developmental biology. He identified how the plant growth hormone cytokinin transmits signals and was the first in the world to show the hormone plays a key role in vascular development and the regulation of aging, a body of work credited with strengthening the theoretical foundation for understanding plant development.
He also demonstrated that proteins derived from phloem, a plant tissue that transports nutrients, play an important role in determining leaf shape, helping establish a new framework for understanding the evolution of vascular plants. Hwang has previously received the Macrogen Science Award, the Cargill Academy Life Science Award and the National Academy of Sciences Award, among others.
Cho, the applied science winner, was honored for using hybrid artificial intelligence technologies to help solve problems in industrial settings. He proposed a method that analyzes data patterns and shifting trends at the same time by combining convolutional neural networks with long short-term memory recurrent neural networks.
In research on forecasting household energy demand, he succeeded in producing stable predictions based on real electricity-use data even across variables such as time of day, weather and living patterns. The work, cited for its potential to improve energy efficiency and reduce costs, was highly regarded in academia and was selected in 2020 as a top 1% most-cited paper in the journal "Energy."
Cho has also advanced applied research including behavior recognition using smartphone sensors, mobile-based landmark detection and models for classifying vehicle noise. He has received the Korea Information Science Society Academic Award and the Order of Service Merit, and has served as chair of the Technology Innovation Subcommittee under the presidential National Artificial Intelligence Committee.
The Sudang Award began in 1973 as the "Sudang Science Award" and was renamed after the launch of Sudang Foundation in 2006. It operates by accepting recommendations in basic science, humanities and social sciences, and applied science, then selecting two researchers with outstanding achievements.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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