Employees and KAIST graduate students complete six-week team projects

Battery performance prediction model wins top prize; eight teams honored

Award recipients and officials pose for a photo at the final judging and awards ceremony of the 2nd Hankook & Company Group-KAIST AI Competition, held June 23 at Hankook Technodom in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon. [Hankook & Company]
Award recipients and officials pose for a photo at the final judging and awards ceremony of the 2nd Hankook & Company Group-KAIST AI Competition, held June 23 at Hankook Technodom in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon. [Hankook & Company]

Hankook & Company Group has teamed up with KAIST to tackle real-world business challenges using AI, bringing together company employees and graduate students to analyze data drawn from manufacturing, research and development, quality control, and supply chain operations.

The group announced Monday that it co-hosted the 2nd Hankook & Company Group-KAIST AI Competition with KAIST's Graduate School of Data Science (GSDS), holding the final judging and awards ceremony June 23 at Hankook Technodom in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon.

The competition ran as a project-based industry-academia collaboration program combining the on-site experience of Hankook & Company Group employees with the data analytics expertise of KAIST GSDS. Mixed teams of company employees and KAIST graduate students spent roughly six weeks analyzing real operational data and developing AI-driven improvement proposals.

A total of 43 employee teams applied to participate. After a document screening and a matching process with KAIST GSDS graduate students, 16 teams advanced to the final round. KAIST GSDS faculty also provided regular advisory support to help each team carry out its project.

Eight teams were recognized in the final results: one grand prize winner, two excellence awards, two merit awards, and three encouragement awards.

The grand prize went to a team from the Next-Generation Battery Development Division — Joo Eun-seo and Byeon Hye-min — for their project on building a battery performance prediction model using cell data. The team applied AI models and data augmentation techniques to battery cell data to improve the accuracy and stability of state-of-charge (SOC) estimation.

Judges particularly praised the team for going beyond simple model development to build an integrated pipeline accounting for real-world applicability in mass-production battery management systems (BMS). The potential to extend the approach across a wider range of battery lineups was also cited as a factor in the award.

Other winning projects covered a range of applications, including shortening testing periods, a self-optimizing vision inspection system, advanced tire management system wear estimation, detection of internal defects in green tires, field quality issue prediction, braking performance prediction, and the development of a supply chain management-specialized AI agent.

AI adoption on the manufacturing floor is expanding beyond simple task automation into quality stabilization, shorter development cycles, and improved operational efficiency. The competition was notable in that frontline employees themselves proposed the challenges and worked alongside external researchers to find solutions.

Kim Sung-jin, executive vice president of Hankook & Company's Digital Strategy Division, said the competition "carries great meaning in that this year's digital transformation and AI transformation challenges from actual worksites were solved by employees and KAIST graduate students working as one team." He added that the company plans to "continue nurturing talent and internalizing technology so that AI can generate tangible business results through internal and external collaboration."

Hankook & Company Group is pursuing digital and AI transformation based on the "data- and AI-driven" strategy championed by Chairman Cho Hyun-bum. The group has been broadening AI adoption across its operations, running an in-house generative AI service called "Chat HK" and a translation service called "Com HK."

The group's collaboration with KAIST has continued to deepen. Hankook & Company Group launched a "Digital Future Innovation Center" with KAIST in 2019 and last year expanded and reorganized it into an "AI Future Innovation Center." The group said it plans to continue running programs with KAIST to strengthen employees' AI literacy and practical capabilities.


kwater@heraldcorp.com