About 60 KAIST professors from different departments have voluntarily established a research center to build a safer and a more secure Korea. The research center, the KAIST Institute for Disaster Studies (KIDS), will focus on researching and developing quality safety technology.

The KIDS President Hee-Kyung Park, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said, “The recent tragic disasters in Korea are mainly attributed to human errors, technological problems, and social policies. To understand the cause of a disaster and prepare for its appropriate responses, we need a comprehensive approach to the issues from the interdisciplinary standpoint of social policy, science, and engineering.”

The research institute is planning to focus on the development of a damage control mechanism and principle to prevent disasters. . An educational curriculum and policy will be devised to support such mechanisms and principles.

KIDS has so far organized five key research departments: research centers for disaster studies and policies,, human error and resilience engineering, social media and machine-based information management, robot-based exploration and rescue technology, and disaster modeling and simulation.

Furthermore, KIDS has devised three key engineering research paradigms: vigilance engineering, socially robust engineering, and civic engineering. The paradigms were established to reexamine the existing engineering mechanisms and principles from the perspectives of social sciences and humanities and to develop novel engineering designs.

On October 22, KAIST hosted an opening ceremony for KIDS at the Multimedia Hall of the Applied Engineering Building (W1). Around 80 important figures, including KAIST President Sung Mo Kang, Mayor of Daejeon, Sun-taik Kwon, and former Minister of the Environment of the Republic of Korea, Myung Ja Kim, attended the ceremony.