Metaverse education blossoms in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan

Still wondering the ultimate value of the Meta.   Have seen simple examples, but not the strongest. 

Metaverse education blossoms in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan

Teaching taps VR even as emerging tech's mass adoption remains in doubt

South Korea's Pohang University of Science and Technology wants to become a "metaversity" with digital classrooms.   © Photo courtesy of Pohang University of Science and Technology

DYLAN LOH, Nikkei staff writer

May 8, 2023 11:29 JST

SINGAPORE -- Educators in Asia are dipping their toes into the metaverse, the much-hyped virtual reality where humans can interact socially in cyberspace, even as emerging technology in this space grapples with finding its place in the real world.

From South Korea to Taiwan, schools and other organizations are tapping the metaverse as a tool for instruction, experimenting with VR applications to bring teaching beyond the classroom and devise new ways of imparting knowledge and skill.

Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea is working to become a "metaversity" where classrooms are digitalized into the metaverse, offering training courses in cyberspace.

The university, known as POSTECH, serves 1,400 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students who work with 450 faculty members and 820 researchers in fields like energy, materials, basic science, information communications technology and health.

"Virtual reality technology can be applied in fields that are difficult to access in reality, such as outer space and the nanoworld," Moo Hwan Kim, the university's president, told Nikkei Asia. "In the long run, it will be able to replace classes that require more hands-on experiences or training in dangerous environments."

POSTECH said it invests $300,000 a year to buy equipment and develop educational programs for students and has pooled $500,000 to build classrooms that tap the metaverse.

In Japan, at N and S high schools, the largest online high schools in the country, 7,000 students learn through VR headsets.

Director Riichiro Sono told Nikkei that the organization took to the metaverse to conduct lessons without physical constraints while providing an immersive environment for individual learning.

The schools surveyed the VR participants last year and found a satisfaction rate of 98.5%, he said, but noted that "it can take time for users to get accustomed to a VR environment" and that "the additional weight of a VR headset can be a deterrent" for some users.  ... '

Scientists Use Quantum Computing to Create Glass that Cuts the Need for AC by a Third

Model testing.   

Scientists Use Quantum Computing to Create Glass that Cuts the Need for AC by a Third

By Popular Science, December 1, 2022

A sample of the glass coating, which you can see through. 

Machine learning and quantum computing were used to test models within fractions of a second, parsing through virtually ever possible mixture and material combination to find the best one.

Two researchers at the University of Notre Dame in collaboration with South Korea's Kyung Hee University recently utilized quantum computing to help develop a new transparent window coating capable of blocking solar heat.

In findings published in ACS Energy Levels, Tengfei Luo, Notre Dame's Dorini Family Professor of Energy Studies, and postdoctoral associate, Seongmin Kim, worked together to devise their transparent radiative cooler (TRC) layer, which only permits external visible light that doesn't raise indoor temperatures, thus cutting buildings' cooling costs by as much as a third of current rates.

According to the International Energy Agency, air conditioning and electric fans comprise 20 percent of buildings' energy costs around the world—roughly 10 percent of human electricity consumption.

From Popular Science

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Optimal Decision Making

 Technical, but quite interesting point being made.  Optimality may be a good thing,  but how do I embed it in useful real time decisions?  Notably too the consideration of noise, often a key consideration.  This worth a look. 

Algorithm for Optimal Decision-Making Under Heavy-Tailed Noisy Rewards

Chung-Ang University (South Korea), November 17, 2022

Researchers at South Korea's Chung-Ang University (CAU) and Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology created an algorithm that supports minimum loss under a maximum-loss scenario (minimax optimality) with minimal prior data. The algorithm addresses sub-optimal performance for heavy-tailed rewards by algorithms designed for stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems. CAU's Kyungjae Lee said the researchers proposed minimax optimal robust upper confidence bound (MR-UCB) and adaptively perturbed exploration (MR-APE) methods. The team obtained gap-dependent and independent upper bounds of the cumulative regret, then assessed their methods via simulations conducted under Pareto and Fréchet noises. The researchers found MR-UCB outperformed other exploration techniques with stronger robustness and a greater number of actions under heavy-tailed noise; MR-UCB and MR-APE also could solve heavy-tailed synthetic and real-world stochastic MAB problems.

Full Article

Digital IDs in South Korea

 Risk and Security of use.  

South Korea Aims to Boost Economy with Digital IDs on Blockchain

Bloomberg, Sam Kim, October 16, 2022

South Korea intends to offer its citizens a blockchain-secured digital identity in order to improve economic growth. The nation will launch digital IDs in 2024, expecting 45 million citizens to be using them within two years. The IDs will be embedded into mobile devices like smartphones. Suh Bo Ram, director-general of South Korea's digital-government bureau, said a decentralized identity framework will prevent the government from accessing data on individual phones, including whose digital IDs are used, how they are used, and where. Hwang Seogwon at South Korea's Science and Technology Policy Institute said although digital IDs can be highly beneficial economically, "there has to be more risk assessment technologically to make sure the danger doesn't outweigh the benefits." ... ' 

Office to Combine people and Robots

Whats the meaning of design here? Having just read James Dyson's bio recently makes me wonder. Lots of prototypes to be tested in context?   Nature of the work?   Is this the ideal time to bring people back to work? 

Futuristic Office Was Designed for 5,000 People--and 100 Robot Coworkers,  By Fast Company, June 3, 2022

South Korean online platform Naver is opening the new world headquarters of its Naver Labs research and development subsidiary in the city of Seongnam this month.

The 28-story building, which the company calls "the world's first robot-friendly building," will feature 100 wheeled robots that will deliver packages and food/drink orders to 5,000 human employees in the building.,  The robots can use the building's 36 human elevators but also have access to the Roboport, a robot-exclusive elevator that works like an internal Ferris wheel.

The robots navigate the building using a traditional video camera, the building's internal 5G network, and a "digital twin" that is cross-referenced with the camera feed to place robots within six inches of a desired location.

From Fast Company

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Deep Learning for Material Design

 Notice the advanced methods being used, like genetic algorithms to improve training.  Use for materials.  Material design continues to be a strong area of use.   See my 'materials' tag.  Technical.

Deep Learning Framework to Enable Material Design in Unseen Domain

KAIST (South Korea), September 29, 2021

Researchers at South Korea's KAIST and the University of California, Berkeley have developed a framework that uses a deep neural network to facilitate more efficient material or structure design beyond the domain of the initial training set. The method compensates for the weak predictive power of neural networks.

This involves three steps:

• using genetic algorithms to search for candidates with improved properties close to the training set, and mixing superior designs in the training set;

• determining whether the candidates actually have improved properties, and using data augmentation to duplicate validated designs and expand the training set; and

• using transfer learning to update the neural network with newly generated superior designs to broaden the reliable prediction domain.

Researchers are using the optimization framework to design metamaterial structures, segmented thermoelectric generators, and optimal sensor distributions.  ... " 

Voice Mental Health from Microsoft

Mental health likely a more useful direction using voice.

Microsoft Pilots Voice AI-Based Senior Mental Healthcare Program in South Korea  By Eric Hal Schartz on July 1, 2020 at 12:00 pm in Voicebot.ai

Microsoft is running a mental healthcare service program for older people using artificial intelligence, voice assistants, and wearable tech in South Korea. The pilot program aims to use the combination of technologies to improve the mental health of people as they age, as a growing body of evidence suggests they can.

AZURE HEALTH
The program is based on Microsoft’s Azure Kinect, essentially a sensor kit connected to artificial intelligence. Kinect combines a high-end camera and microphone with other sensors to detect human movement. That information will be combined with data from smartwatches and other wearable tech and analyzed by the AI. Smart speakers will allow participants to interact directly with the AI by voice or by typing on a keyboard, and the voice assistant will offer advice on how to manage and improve mental health. The ultimate goal is to use the information collected to build a better system of care for older people.  ... " 

Blockchains for Clinical Data

Example of blockchain use in healthcare data applications.

South Korean Government Turns to Blockchain Tech to More Reliably Store Clinical Diabetes Data
Jun 29, 2020 at 08:46 UTC in Coindesk

The South Korean government wants to develop a blockchain registry to help analyze, anonymize and store clinical data for diabetes.

Blockchain startup Sendsquare has been selected by the government to develop a proof-of-concept project for the nation, which has around 3.6 million people with diabetes, the company announced on Friday.

The startup will team with clinical experts and practitioners from Seoul’s KyungHee University Medical Center to begin analyzing nine years-worth of diabetes clinical data previously collected by the center.

“Storing and collaborating work across a large volume of data using centralized services has proven unwieldy and subject to issues of data loss, duplication and manipulation,” according to KyungHee Medical Center’s Professor Suk Chon.  ... "