with Up to 6 Billion Korean Won Government Support

Sahmyook University has recently been selected to run the National Program of Excellence in Software, supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT. Winning in the 5.2-to-1 competition, the university is now to receive up to 1 billion Korean won of annual government funding for the next 6 years (4 years plus an additional 2 years) at the most.

As a part of the government’s grand initiative in which 1 trillion won will be injected to cultivate 100,000 specialists in the fields of AI and software by 2025 for fulfilling one of the K-New Deal goals, the ‘National Program of Excellence in Software’ aims to innovate and expand software education in universities. From its first launch in 2015 to 2019, the program had been entrusted to 40 different universities and has produced 25,095 SW specialists and 15,642 convergence specialists for the past 6 years, up to last year.

The selectees for the program this year include two universities on the special track (5.2-to-1 ratio), one of which is Sahmyook University, and seven universities on the general track (4-to1 ratio).

SU will run the program with the goal of ‘nurturing convergence experts in the field of software for health science for a healthy local community.’ With over a century of accumulated know-how in the specialization of health science, the university has an ambitious plan of developing convergence specialists with software expertise by grafting new technologies, including AI and big data, into healthcare.

The first step of the plan SU is taking is creating three interdisciplinary courses, with SW-based specialization in heatlh sciences, including SW-based addiction psychology, SW-based addiction rehabilitation, and SW-based healthcare big data. These courses are a convergence of the Departments of Computer Science and AI Informatics, which are SW·AI majors, and the Departments of Nursing, Physical Therapy, Counseling Psychology, and Pharmacy, which are healthcare majors.

The university also will restructure the software-related departments. The AI Informatics Division, which is an integration of the Department of Management Information Systems within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of IT Convergence Engineering within the College of Engineering will be reformed into the College of AI Convergence to lay the foundation for software education. The full-time faculty will be expanded from the current 14 members to 30 members by April of next year. The number of software specialization labs will also be increased from 7 to 24. Moreover, SU will create a new admission type, called the ‘SW Specialist’ and provide scholarships for software specialization to all the new students of the College of Future Convergence in the Division of SW & AI.

Sahmyook University also plans to intensify basic software training for the whole school. The current single course ‘Computational Thinking’ will be divided into multiple courses, customized for each academic major. Furthermore, basic software training for soon-to-be freshmen will be introduced under the courses called, ‘Software and Future Society’ and ‘Computational Thinking and Basic Coding.’

Additionally, the university is enhancing its industry-academia cooperation curriculum to cultivate software specialists with ample on-site experience. All juniors and seniors in software-related majors are now mandated to take this course which provides an opportunity for them to participate in projects conducted by corporations.

“Specialization in healthcare and health science is one of our university’s long-established strengths,” said President Kim Il-mok. “We will take this opportunity of running the National Program of Excellence in Software to turn that strength into software-based convergence education which is in tune with the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution.”