Welcome. I am Minseok Song, Director of the POSTECH Tae-Joon Park Institute for Future Strategy.
The Institute was founded to carry forward the spirit of the late Chairman Tae-Joon Park, and on that foundation to seek out POSTECH’s vision and a sustainable direction for its development.
Chairman Park held, as a settled conviction, that industry and education are the core of national development. He founded POSCO and POSTECH, and contributed greatly to Korea’s economic growth and to the training of its scientists and engineers. He regarded education above all as the most important investment a nation makes in its own future, and insisted that practical scholarship and creative research must be held in balance. A university’s central duty, he believed, is to equip students not merely to acquire knowledge but to solve the problems their country and society actually face.
I too grew up as a researcher and a teacher at the POSTECH he founded. Studying, doing research and teaching here, I have come to feel deeply how one person’s conviction and devotion can build a company and a university and change the future of a nation. What POSTECH gave me — the chance to learn and to grow — is the ground everything else in my career stands on, and I hope to repay that debt by studying his spirit rightly and making it widely known.
The Institute will carry out its work around three central aims.
First, to study and set out POSTECH’s medium- and long-term development strategy in response to rapid change in science, technology and social structure. We will analyse where change is heading and seek strategic direction across education, research and industry collaboration, so that the university can take a further step toward the front rank of research universities worldwide.
Second, to study the life, philosophy and leadership of Chairman Park systematically, and to pass them to the next generation. We will re-examine what his sense of responsibility to nation and community, his practical spirit in taking on the impossible and delivering, and his firm belief in people and in education mean for our society today — and strengthen our research, teaching, record-keeping and outreach so that this spirit feeds the growth and leadership of those who come next.
Third, to examine, from several vantage points, the nature of technology and the effect that coming technological change will have on people and on society. Beyond the promise of artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other frontier fields, we will look broadly at the industries, education, jobs and social structures they will alter, and at the ethical and policy questions they raise. Beyond the advance of technology itself, we will build a forum for research and public debate on what future technology ought to make, and how it should be used responsibly for humanity and for society.
We will do our utmost so that the Institute does not rest at commemorating past achievement, but carries the spirit of Tae-Joon Park forward in a form fitted to our own time — a research platform that helps design the future of POSTECH and of Korea.
We ask for your continued interest and support.
Thank you.
Director, POSTECH Tae-Joon Park Institute for Future Strategy Minseok Song
※ Translated from the Korean edition; the Korean page is authoritative.