Kim Jae-gyeong, a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the head of the biomedical mathematics group at the Institute for Basic Science, made history in August at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Annual Meeting 2025 held in Montreal, Canada, becoming the first Korean and the youngest keynote speaker in over 70 years since the conference's founding in 1952.
SIAM is a globally recognized authority in the field of applied mathematics, and the SIAM Annual Meeting is the largest academic conference in applied mathematics, attended by over 3,000 mathematicians, engineers, and data scientists from around the world. Only a select few researchers with outstanding academic achievements and influence are invited as keynote speakers.
Kim's research has drawn international attention for its interdisciplinary work in mathematics, machine learning, and computational science to elucidate the mechanisms of sleep and biological rhythms, extending into digital therapies and drug evaluation. This invitation is viewed as a symbolic event recognizing Kim's accumulated academic achievements and influence on an international scale, establishing Korea's mathematical community's global status.
In the keynote speech, Kim introduced recent research findings on solving global health issues through the integration of mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, he highlighted research developing mathematics-based causal estimation methods to clarify the impact of climate on the spread of infectious diseases, identifying treatment targets where antibiotic effects are consistently maintained through techniques that combine mathematical models with neural networks, and analyzing personal sleep data to recommend customized sleep patterns using mathematical models and AI. This algorithm is actually implemented in the Samsung Galaxy Watch, currently used by millions of people worldwide.
Kim noted in his lecture that "the fusion of mathematics and AI is a key tool for realizing personalized healthcare and precision medicine" and added that "this keynote speech is an important milestone demonstrating that Korean mathematics can play a central role on the global research stage."