LG Electronics said on the 14th that it recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at Seoul National University in Gwanak District, Seoul, to establish the "Secured AI Research Center."
LG Electronics will jointly carry out a range of industry-academia projects with Seoul National University, leveraging the school's world-class researchers and extensive infrastructure, from securing core AI security technologies to implementing safe AI services. The new research center will focus on researching and developing technologies that build a safe AI ecosystem, including security enhancement for LLM (large language model) agents and data leakage prevention.
Specifically, it will establish an "MLSecOps" model, which applies a security framework across the entire software development and operations lifecycle. While LLM agents—which understand and generate language and perform various tasks—are widely used in daily life to provide convenience, threats have also increased, including ▲ hallucination that generates false information ▲ attempts at external data exfiltration. Because these threats are difficult to address comprehensively with existing DevOps and MLOps approaches, the goal is to implement a more security-focused framework to prepare integrated countermeasures.
It also plans to develop an AI security platform that can be applied to real industrial environments, performing integrated roles such as intrusion detection and data protection across the entire process from data collection to training, deployment, operation, and disposal.
The inaugural center director will be Professor Hong Yong-taek, head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University. Hong is a fellow of the Society for Information Display (SID) and a full member of The Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST), and is a science and technology leader who received the Order of Science and Technology Merit Innovation Medal in 2025.
At LG Electronics, Im Hyo-jun, head of the Next-Generation Computing Research Institute in the CTO division, will oversee and coordinate the research projects. The Next-Generation Computing Research Institute is an organization that proactively secures future technologies—such as next-generation security, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, and distributed computing—and creates innovative business value.
Kim Ju-han, vice president for research at Seoul National University, said, "We expect to develop world-class AI security technologies and produce research outcomes that lead global standards."
Kim Byung-hoon, executive vice president and CTO of LG Electronics, said, "As AI technology is used across various fields such as home appliances, mobility, and robots, security and safety are becoming essential," and added, "We will advance next-generation security technologies to build leadership in AI security and strive to provide safer and more trustworthy products and services to customers and society."