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KIST Spurs Commercialization of Smart Farm Research (2016.10.24)
- Date : 2017-04-20
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Global Cooperation Department
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KIST Spurs Commercialization of Smart Farm Research
- R&D outcomes presented to enterprises for rapid commercialization
On Tuesday, October 18, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) hosted the Technical Showcase Workshop for Smart Farm Commercialization at its main campus in Seoul, where it informed various enterprises of the current outcomes of its Smart Farm Project in hopes of commercializing these outcomes prior to the project’s completion.
In October 2015, the KIST Gangneung Institute of Natural Products organized the SFS Convergent Research Group via funding from both the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning and the National Research Council of Science and Technology. Since then, the group has been leading the Smart Farm Project, which has garnered participation from four government-funded research institutes (the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, the Korea Institute of Energy Research, and the Korea Food Research Institute) and 10 companies (including SK Telecom), in hopes of commercializing the results within three years. With the project now one year underway, the workshop was organized to introduce companies to technologies currently in development as a way of encouraging these companies to join the project at its halfway point.
Capitalizing on each government-funded research institute’s strengths, the technologies presented at this workshop included complex environmental control technology for smart farming, work management optimization technology, optimum energy management technology, information technology, and smart farm technology for functional crops. These technologies are now being empirically tested in demo farms within KIST Gangneung and Cheonan, Chungcheongnam-do, and pilot projects in local farming complexes are slated to begin. In September, it signed a multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University of Manitoba, the Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN), KAST Engineering, and Gyeongbuk Technopark, thereby establishing a foundation for KIST smart farm technology to advance into the Canadian market.