At least one enemy of the Moon administration has been able to keep his job and avoid jail for now:
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) President Shin Sung-chul attends the board meeting at the Eltower in Yangjae-dong, southern Seoul, Friday. / Yonhap
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) President Shin Sung-chul will keep his post after the board decided Friday to defer the voting on whether to suspend him.
The board meeting was in response to a Ministry of Science and ICT’s demand to suspend Shin for allegedly embezzling money from the national research fund when he was Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) president in 2014.
Shin denied the accusations, but the science ministry also filed a complaint with the prosecution.
“During the board meeting, the claims of the two sides from the government and the school were in opposition to each other, but they agreed to postpone the suspension voting,” a KAIST spokesman told reporters at the Eltower in southern Seoul.
The school said the issue would be discussed at the next board meeting. KAIST is scheduled to hold its regular board meeting in early 2019.
It appears that the Blue House is going after anyone remotely connected with former President Park Geun-hye, here is the latest example:
Shin Sung-chul
The president of KAIST, Korea’s top science and engineering university, is the target of a government inquiry that some suspect to be politically motivated.
The Science Ministry on Tuesday issued a request to KAIST’s board of trustees that it suspend Shin Sung-chul, KAIST’s incumbent president, six days after it formally recommended he be criminally charged for embezzlement and breach of duty.
The board will decide whether to suspend Shin after an internal meeting next Thursday.
“I cannot help but feel devastated that such accusations are being brought up now,” Shin said at a press conference at KAIST on Tuesday. “We already received a detailed government audit at DGIST [his former workplace where the irregularities are supposed to have occurred] back in 2016.”
But analysts are claiming political motives are behind the investigation.
Shin’s alleged misconduct dates to his days as the founding president of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST), a lesser known public science and engineering institute located in Daegu.
DGIST signed a memorandum of understanding with an American research institute in February 2012. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) – better known as Berkeley Lab – agreed to provide DGIST with cutting edge research equipment from its Center for X-ray Optics in exchange for research fees from DGIST. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but apparently money from DGIST was sent to Berkeley for the equipment that the government is claiming was public grant money. Shin says the equipment was never supposed to be sent to DGIST for free by Berkeley and that public grants were not used to pay for it.
Here is why the Blue House is allegedly trying to get rid of Shin, he is an old elementary school friend of former President Park Geun-hye:
“Even if the government’s accusations are true, it is unclear how Shin can be accused of embezzlement when he himself did not take the money,” said Lee Byung-tae, a professor at KAIST’s Graduate School of Management. “Science Minister You Young-min himself said the issue was out of his hands, but this recent move looks like it has the Blue House behind it.”
Lee added that Shin’s decision to appoint Lim as a professor was completely within the realm of his discretion as university president. If wrongdoing is indeed clear, the board of trustees at KAIST can easily decide on their own to fire Shin, Lee said.
Shin has refused to step down from his position, saying he would make that decision once the board meets and reaches a conclusion.
An elementary school colleague of former President Park Geun-hye, Shin became KAIST’s president last February amid a controversial selection process in which he was accused of being a political appointment. Shin has not complained of political persecution.
It looks like this is a pretty impressive robot that KAIST won this recent competition with:
On Saturday, Team KAIST from South Korea emerged as the winner of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in Pomona, Calif., after its robot, an adaptable humanoid called DRC-HUBO, beat out 22 other robots from five different countries, winning the US $2 million grand prize. The robot’s “transformer” ability to switch back and forth from a walking biped to a wheeled machine proved key to its victory. Many robots lost their balance and collapsed to the ground while trying to perform tasks such as opening a door or operating a drill. Not DRC-HUBO. Its unique design allowed it to perform tasks faster and, perhaps more important, stay on its feet—and wheels.
“Bipedal walking [for robots] is not very stable yet,” Jun Ho Oh, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology who led the KAIST Team, told IEEE Spectrum. “One single thing goes wrong, the result is catastrophic.” He said a robot with a humanoid form has advantages when operating in a human environment, but he wanted to find a design that could minimize the risk of falls. “I thought about different things, and the simplest was wheels on the knees.”
You can read more at the link, but basically KAIST won the competition because this robot completed all the tasks that the organizers outlined for this competition.
President Park Geun-hye and young venture company owners use a monopod to take a photo during a ceremony marking the launch of a creative economy and innovation center at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, central South Korea, on Oct. 10, 2014. (Yonhap)
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