Yu-Wang Kim and Ji-Yeon Kim Receive “Minister of Science and ICT Award” at the 15th ICT Paper Competition

Yu-Wang Kim (Integrated PhD Program, Department of Electrical Engineering) and Ji-Yeon Kim (Integrated PhD Program, Department of IT Convergence) from POSTECH (advisor: Professor Tae-Hyun Oh) were awarded the Minister of Science and ICT Award (Grand Prize; prize money: 15 million KRW) at the 15th ICT Paper Competition, jointly hosted by Electronic Times, WebCash Group, and the Software Mutual Aid Association.

The competition aims to promote research excellence in the ICT field by recognizing outstanding papers. The team’s research on “Text-Based 4D Human Avatar Generation” stood out among numerous submissions to secure the top honor.

Research Highlights

Kim and Kim proposed a groundbreaking system that generates realistic and dynamic 4D human avatars based solely on textual descriptions of behavior and appearance. A key innovation of the technology is its ability to express the avatar’s movements and physical characteristics without relying on pre-existing training data. This technology is expected to significantly enhance AR/VR applications and advance metaverse technology through its robust and realistic 3D content creation capabilities.

Achievements and Impact

This research builds on their earlier work, which was published and presented at the prestigious European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022. Additionally, their continued excellence in this area was demonstrated by winning the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2022 last year. This year’s Minister of Science and ICT Award further underscores their impactful contributions to the ICT field.

Currently, Yu-Wang Kim is actively conducting research as a research intern at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (University of Tübingen) in Germany, continuing his innovative work in this domain.

This achievement highlights POSTECH’s commitment to fostering world-class researchers and advancing cutting-edge ICT technologies.