Professional History

In 1983, I earned my BS in Industrial Chemistry from Kon-Kuk University, Seoul, Korea, and earned MS degrees in both Chemical Engineering and Computer Science from Kon-Kuk University in 1985 and 1992, respectively. 

In 1945, the Korean government established a law mandating military service. After graduating, I passed the exam and evaluation for the short term military service program for gifted young scientists. For this program, I served as a lieutenant for 6 months (Oct. 1985 – Apr. 1986).  I made friends with army officers who majored in computer science and engineering. They earned MS and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from universities in the U.S. , and eventually I got the vision of my plan for a professional career as a computer scientist.

When I fulfilled the army service in 1986, I applied for the research scientist position at the Systems Engineering Research Institute (SERI), which is part of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) located in Seoul , Korea .  At that time SERI with only 350 research scientists was the only non-profit research organization in Korea . After a series of exams, tests, interviews, presentations, and three months of on-the-job-evaluation, I was finally chosen as one of the 28 computer scientist members out of 3,200 candidates.

The first research project I joined was the development of the 24th Summer Olympic Games Information Online Network System (GIONS) (1987-1988).  I was very happy to find the term GIONS in a recently published article.  It was one of the most exciting research projects in my life.  However, I thought the system we developed seemed inefficient in delivering information perspective.  When I discussed this issue with my colleagues and correspondents in the domestic press room, one of them suggested the Internet, which was one of the most common tools in most U.S. universities, could possibly solve the issue. That suggestion led me to pursue the Internet.  I was a principal member of research staff in the field of Internet, software engineering, data communication, computer networks, and information security until 1996.

In 1996, my supervisor, Dr. Okhwan Byeon, recommended me to Dr. Taiyun Kim at the Korea university.  Dr. Kim accepted me as one of his PhD students.  I earned my PhD in computer science in 2001.  Unfortunately, Dr. Kim passed away after Christmas that year due to his cancer.

I was temporarily in charge of Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT)- Korea for 9 months at SERI in 1995.  The next year, when SERI followed Korean government recommendation of consolidating into ETRI, I joined the research division of the Electronic Commerce Technology at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI).  From 2000 to 2002, I was a team leader of the Electronic Payment Research Team.  Being a manager of research projects and being a principal investigator were great challenges in my career.

At the end of my projects in 2002, I joined the Sensor Networking Research Team and Ubiquitous Home Service Research Team until August 2005.  When I decided that I needed to deepen my field of research topics, one of my colleagues, Chungnae Cho, PhD student in the CISE Department at the University of Florida, sent a pdf file of an article explaining the Gator Tech Smart House.  I proposed my plan of research topics to Dr. Helal, and was appointed as a post doctoral research fellow for 2 years (2006-2007) in Dr. Helal's lab at the University of Florida .

My current research topics include issues regarding inter-space interactions between user and service, converting real-world sensor information to contextual information, sensor networking, context-aware computing, intelligent agents, and security and privacy in ubiquitous pervasive computing environments.  At present, I am a member of the Korean Home Network Forum (KHNF), Korean Information Processing Academic Society (KIPS), Korean Institute of Communication Sciences (KICS), and Korean Institute of Information & Communication Security & Cryptology (KIICS).

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