한국통신학회 KICS

President’s letter for 2023 

  Dear members of the Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences (KICS), 

With 2023 off to a good start under the slogan "the Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences as an academic society representing Korea," we are ending this year with noticeable achievements, thanks to enormous interest and participation from all of our members, while establishing ourselves as an academic society representing Korea. Above all, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone and share the KICS's some of the most important activities this year. 

(1) We held academic events with the highest level and largest scale in our history. 

  The scale of the conferences we hosted in February for winter (Yongpyong), in June for summer (Jeju), and in November for fall (Gyeongju) was the largest in our history. In particular, after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, we held all of the events face-to-face this year, which attracted the largest number of participants ever.   We are confident that we have made remarkable progress in not only quantity but quality, as most of our session venues were fully packed with participants through a variety of special programs, which take the lead in the field of future communications and interdisciplinary information and communications technology (ICT), including seminars with internationally renowned scholars as guest speakers, seminars with leading researchers in the academic fields that have garnered the most attention recently, and special seminars with companies across industries. 

  Moreover, ICTC 2023, our most well-known international conference held in October in Jeju, was hosted successfully as an all-face-to-face event, even without online participation, with many foreign researchers, generating the largest revenue ever and greatly improving awareness about the KICS across the world.

(2) This year marked the first year of our digital social contributions. 

  At the beginning of 2023, I told you that we would explore ways to share our progress with and contribute to society as an academic society representing Korea. Back then, I said that the KICS has grown rapidly, and we now have noblesse oblige to share our progress with society and especially vulnerable groups in terms of information. Starting with offering free tailored courses related to communications to share knowledge, we opened 3 courses, which recorded more than 2,000 views, and provided expert matching solutions for technical difficulties experienced by small and medium-sized businesses. Most of all, with support from Codeit, an online coding education organization, we were able to provide free coding education to low-income and information-disadvantaged groups. With Yana, an organization that supports young people who are preparing to leave orphanages and get on their feet, we were able to select and support young people preparing for financial independence, who want to receive software education. Furthermore, at a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) on a massive scale is becoming the country's underlying technology, developing AI through high-quality data would be a good course of action to compete with countries with deep pockets, such as the United States and China. The KICS has very good data, including research papers and conference proceedings.   We are working to contribute to the country by providing these data to Samsung Electronics in an effort to support the development of generative AI with a global competitive edge. We have begun to see some good results thanks to the interest and support from many of our members over the past year, and I hope that the KICS will be able to contribute more and more to our society. 

(3) We have made our strengths stronger and made up for our weaknesses. 

  The KICS has 30,000 members and is growing with participation from most industries, academic institutions, and research institutes related to ICT. Nevertheless, companies in the defense industry and mid-sized IT companies, which were not yet actively participating in the KICS, became new sponsors and continued vigorous activities this year, and the KICS’s overall sponsored fund also increased. Furthermore, we newly created a research paper competition sponsored by HFR to promote domestic academic activities. We also created a new KICS invitational event to solidify ties with companies across industries, which was successfully completed with the participation of more than 40 companies. We invited key officials from the government to our academic events, enabling communication and collaboration between industry, academia, research, and government. As the KICS is a large academic society, there has been some lack of effort in terms of promoting activities for new people and organizing the Board of Trustees based on active members. This year, we introduced some changes in selecting candidates for the Board of Trustees by evaluating their participation in conferences. Subsequently, the Board of Trustees is made up of members who are actually active in conferences, and a lot of younger members have been added to bring more energy. In terms of the Board of Executive Directors, 20% of the Executive Directors are newly recruited as new people who have actively participated in the KICS. Furthermore, the Board has also been reorganized to allow new researchers to the roles of the Executives and Directors, adding more vitality to the KICS. Meanwhile, to share the leading research results of our members, we have continued to make quantitative and qualitative progress in not only our domestic journals but also our SCI-level international journals JCN and ICT Express. Most notably, we are working hard to move our international journals up to the top ranks (Q2 for JCN and Q1 for ICT Express) with open access and continuous improvements in the citation index. To make further progress for our domestic journals, we have made efforts to make our way into the Scopus list this year and have achieved a certain level of results. We have filed an application and are currently waiting for the outcome. Our domestic chapters also had many activities this year. In addition to expanding our domestic chapters’ own activities and submitting more articles to conferences, all of our domestic chapters jointly held a workshop in Gwangju with the Executive Officers from the headquarters, and ICMIC 2023, an international conference organized by one of our chapters which started last year, was successfully hosted in Jeju with more paper submissions and greater participation. For our international chapters, our Japanese chapter, which we have been seeking for a long time, was finally established and successfully hosted 2 workshops with substantive information exchanges between the two countries. As described above, this year marked a year in which the KICS grew its reach, further strengthened its capabilities, and began to make social contributions befittingly as an academic society representing Korea. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you once again as all of these activities were made possible by the active participation and support of our members. Based on these achievements, I am confident that the KICS will continue to develop and lead the communications and ICT field in Korea and around the world in the next year, which marks the 50th anniversary of the KICS’s inception. Thank you. 

​ 

Een-Kee Hong ​

President of the KICS​ 

and Professor of Electronics and Radio Engineering at Kyung Hee University ​

Brief biography:​ ​

(Currently) Chairman of the Radio Policy Advisory Committee, Ministry of Science and ICT

(Former) Principal Researcher at SK Telecom and NTT DoCoMo, and Visiting Professor at Oregon State University

(Former) Chairman of the 5G Frequency Advisory Committee, Ministry of Science and ICT, and Member of the Frequency Review Committee, Office for Government Policy Coordination

(Former) Frequency Chairman of the 5G Forum, and Frequency Chairman of the Satellite Communications Forum

(Former) Chairman of the 5G-Based Smart Factory Forum

(Former) Mobile Communications Research Institute, Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences, and Chairman of Seoul Chapter, IEEE VTS