Kim Jong-Hwan

Kim, Jong-Hwan is a pioneer in the field of Ubiquitous Robotics and Soccer Robotics, nominated as the Father of Robot Football, (entitled by The Times on September 18, 1997). Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot) was his brainchild in October 1995. He is the Founder of FIRA in June 1997 and IROC in October 1998. He is the President of FIRA (Federation of International Robot-soccer Association), of IROC (International Robot Olympiad Committee), and of the Korea Robot Soccer Association, and Honorary President of the China Robot Soccer Association. He was Organizing Chair of 96, 97 MiroSot Korea, 98 FIRA Robot World Cup France, 99 Brazil, and 99 Robot Olympiad Korea.

His research interests are in the areas of Evolutionary Multi-agent Robotic Systems. Some of the Robotic projects born out of his lab include the small sized humanoid "Hansaram" and the artificial creature "Rity". He has coined the terms "Ubiquitous Robotics" and "Genetic Robot", with the latter being the result of path-breaking research work incorporating artificial chromosomes into a Robot thereby investigating the "Origin of the Artificial Species".

He is the Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and of the International Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, and was a Member of the Editorial Board of the Korea Fuzzy and Intelligent Systems society. He was the Guest Editor of the special issue on MiroSot'96 of the Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and of the special issue on Soccer Robotics of the Journal of Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing. He is one of the co-founders of Asia-Pacific Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning (SEAL) and was Organizing Chair and Program Co-chair of SEAL'96 and Program Co-chair of SEAL98 and 2000. He was General Chair of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2001.He was nominated as the "New Century Leader 500" by Barons Who's who in 2000. He has published more than 200 International Journal/Conference papers

Kim received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1981, 1983, and 1987, respectively. From 1984 to 1988, he was a Research Assistant in the Department of Electronics Engineering at Seoul National University. Since 1988, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he is currently a Professor at the Robot Intelligence Technology (RIT)Lab. He was a visiting scholar at Purdue University from September 1992 to August 1993.

He is the recipient of the 1988 Choongang Young Investigator Award from the Choongang Memorial Foundation, the LG YonAm Foundation Research Fellowship in 1992, the Korean Presidential Award in 1997, and the SeoAm Foundation Research Fellowship in 1999. He was and is a Technical Advisor to Hyundai Heavy Industry Co. Ltd. and Yujin Robotics Co., Seoul, Korea, a special member of science and technology group of Korea National Assembly, a planning committee member of World Technopolis Association (WTA) and Vice President of Young Astronaut Korea (YAK). Currently, he is the Direct of MRDEC (Micro-Robot Design Education Center) supported by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy(MOCIE) of the Republic of Korea.