Hankook extends tech collaboration with Korean university

Seoul – Hankook & Co. Ltd has extended its existing partnership with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) to advance digital technology-based innovations.

The two partners signed their first agreement in 2019 and established HK-Kaist Digital Innovation Centre, an industry-academia joint venture to accelerate R&D and digital technology competence.

Through the extended cooperation, announced 18 May, Hankook and Kaist will focus on expanding their partnership using data from seven new projects. 

These experiments, Hankook said in a statement, will include studying ‘AI reverse engineering of recipes and automated big data model building’ and ‘development of machine learning model for predicting compound property based on molecular structure.

Another study will look into technology development for advancing virtual prediction based on AI, it added.

In its first two years of their cooperation, the HK-Kaist Digital Innovation Centre carried out 12 research projects, which led to a number of significant achievements for Hankook..

These included virtual compound design (VCD) system which predicts the characteristics of tire compound using artificial intelligence (AI), sensor-powered automatic inspection process, and Hankook condition monitoring system plus (CMS+) which detects facility anomaly using AI and IoT.

As part of their extended collaboration, the partners will also aim to foster creative talent for the needs of industrial sites. 

This, Hankook said, is in addition to its own internal and external training programmes to improve its pool of digital experts.