DTU inspires university in Asia

Professor Jeong-Guon Ih is currently guesting DTU Electrical Engineering on a 3-month Otto Mønsted visiting professorship. He hopes to expand the universities’ partnership on research and education over the coming years.

It is not usual for the dean of a university to be allowed to take an extended sabbatical abroad. But Professor Jeong-Guon Ih has been granted special permission to do so, partly because the partnership between DTU and KAIST in his specialist area—sound and acoustics—has developed strongly in recent years.

“Over the past 4–5 years, we at KAIST have enjoyed an excellent working relationship with DTU centred on our dual degree programme, which presents an opportunity that a number of students, both Danish and Korean, take up every year. I consider this to be a suitable level and extremely satisfactory. Several acoustics researchers from KAIST have visited DTU over the past few years, and a large number of researchers from DTU Electrical Engineering—specifically, Finn Agerkvist, Efrén Fernandez Grande, Vicente Cutanda Henriquez, Cheol-Ho Jeong, Jonas Brunskog and Junghwan Kook—were all in Korea this summer. I hope that we can grow the partnership between the highly skilled Danish and Korean researchers. Each of the two universities possesses extensive expertise in the field of acoustics, and as I see it, the synergies here have the capacity to generate amazing results,” he says.

Professor Jeong-Guon Ih himself is deeply interested in research and in refining both the theory and the practical application of inverse vibro-acoustics. This is a field utilized, for example, in the design of machines that play key roles in our everyday lives: car engines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, etc.For researchers, it is a question of identifying and isolating sources of noise, and then establishing the fundamental methods capable of altering or even eliminating this noise. While we, as consumers, may not necessarily demand silent operation, we are, for instance, interested in vacuum cleaners that generate a pleasant noise that simultaneously signals efficiency and effective suction.

There can be no doubt that Professor Jeong-Guon Ih has identified great potential in the partnership between the two universities.“KAIST was recently crowned the most innovative university in Asia, and traditionally maintains a comprehensive working relationship with the business community. DTU is also strong in these fields, but I still think you can learn from us. In return, we can learn from your systematic approach—for example, with regard to your objective of becoming one of the leading technical universities in Europe. Similarly, DTU is distinguished by a degree of openness and global adaptation that we are striving to achieve in Korea, but which we cannot learn from our large neighbouring countries.”

The partnership with KAIST is especially comprehensive in the field of sound and acoustics, but there are also other areas in which DTU has a broad interface with the elite Korean university. These include the fields of robot technology, energy, mechanics and biomedicine.