Korea & Company Group co-hosts AI competition with KAIST

The Hankook & Company Group (Chairman Cho Hyun-bum) has jointly held an AI competition with KAIST Graduate School of Data Science (hereinafter referred to as KAIST GSDS) to tackle practical business challenges using data.

The Hankook & Company Group announced that it conducted the '2nd Hankook & Company Group-KAIST AI Competition' in collaboration with KAIST GSDS, and held the final evaluation and awards ceremony on the 23rd at the high-tech research centre 'Hankook Technodome' in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon.

This competition was a project-based industry-academia collaboration programme combining the practical expertise of Hankook & Company Group employees with the data science capabilities of KAIST GSDS. It operated by having employees and KAIST GSDS postgraduate students form teams to solve data challenges identified in industrial fields such as manufacturing, research and development, quality, and supply chain management (SCM) using artificial intelligence algorithms.

Out of a total of 43 employee teams that applied, 16 teams advanced to the finals after document screening and a matching process with KAIST GSDS postgraduate students. Each team worked on practical data-based tasks for approximately six weeks to derive solutions, with participating KAIST GSDS faculty providing regular advisory support for the project execution.

As a result of the evaluation, a total of eight teams were selected as winners: one grand prize team, two first runner-up teams, two second runner-up teams, and three encouragement prize teams.

The grand prize was awarded to the team of Joo Eun-seo and Byun Hye-min from the ES) Next-Generation Battery Development division for their project 'Building a Battery Performance Prediction Model Using Cell Data'.

This team utilised AI models and data augmentation techniques based on battery cell data to improve the accuracy and stability of battery state of charge (SOC) estimation. In particular, they received high praise for building an integrated pipeline that considered not only model development but also the mass production application of actual battery management systems (BMS), demonstrating practical applicability and scalability to various future battery line-ups.

Other award-winning projects included areas such as reducing testing periods, building a self-optimising vision inspection system, advancing TMS wear estimation technology, detecting internal non-conformities in green tyres, predicting field quality issues, predicting braking performance, and building an AI agent specialised for supply chain management (SCM).

Based on Chairman Cho Hyun-bum's 'Data·AI Driven' strategy, the Hankook & Company Group is accelerating its group-wide digital transformation (DX) and artificial intelligence transformation (AX). By operating the in-house generative AI service 'ChatHK' and the translation service 'CommHK', the group is integrating AI into daily work while expanding the scope of AI application across all areas including marketing, sales, logistics, production, and quality management, thereby realising the group's digital transformation vision of 'AI In Motion'.

Since 2019, the group has continued its industry-academia collaboration with KAIST, starting with the operation of the 'Digital Future Innovation Centre', which was expanded and reorganised last year into the 'AI Future Innovation Centre' to strengthen AI and data-focused cooperation. The group plans to continue enhancing the AI literacy and expertise of its employees based on its collaboration with KAIST in the future.