■The Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI) announced that it has transferred technology for developing transmission electron microscope (TEM) systems to domestic corporations. KBSI signed a technology transfer contract with Mcrafts, agreeing to receive an upfront technology fee of 100 million won and a running royalty of 5% of net sales. Mcrafts, a specialized development and manufacturing corporation for electron microscopes in South Korea, is preparing to launch low-voltage TEM commercial products through this technology transfer. The global TEM market is dominated by companies from Japan and the United States, which hold 97% of the market.
■The Ministry of Science and ICT noted that the '2nd 2030 Advisory Group' was launched on the 20th. The advisory group consists of 20 young members, including engineering and science university students and researchers from academia, industry, and research institutions. The advisory group members will be divided into two sectors focusing on R&D and AI to gather young people's opinions and convey them to the Ministry of Science and ICT, offering various perspectives from a youth viewpoint.
■Lee Seung-hyun, an alumnus of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Department of Computer Science, donated the entire reward of $220,000 (approximately 300 million won) he received for reporting a vulnerability in the Google Chrome browser to KAIST. Lee is pursuing a doctoral program at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. from September 2024. He has conducted research to identify vulnerabilities in various web browsers and discovered a vulnerability in the web assembly code of the Chrome browser. Google paid a total reward of $110,000, and when Lee decided to donate the full amount to KAIST, the matching donation program contributed an additional $110,000, bringing the total donation to KAIST to $220,000.
■The Korean Intellectual Property Office announced that it will newly designate three private corporations as original certification institutions to improve the quality of its trade secret original certification services. This service certifies whether an electronic file containing trade secrets is original, currently offered only by the Korea Intellectual Property Protection Agency. As of the end of last year, the number of uses of the original certification service reached 215,000.