ULSAN — Technologies that train artificial intelligence without moving sensitive manufacturing data outside a company, along with ways to use process time-series data, were presented to Ulsan's industrial community. The aim was to offer practical solutions to local factories struggling to adopt AI because of data security concerns and a lack of in-house capability.
The Ulsan Information Industry Promotion Agency and the Digital Innovation U Forum held the "2nd Plenary Meeting and Industrial AX (AI Transformation) Technology Trends Seminar" at the agency's main auditorium on the 15th. About 50 people attended, including Lee Dong-gu, chair of the Digital Innovation U Forum and an honorary researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology and visiting professor at the University of Ulsan, along with subcommittee members, officials from local companies and outside experts. The seminar was open to local business owners as well as forum members.
The keynote presentations focused on data security at manufacturing sites and technologies for making production processes more intelligent. Yoo Jae-joon, a professor at the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), presented on trends and applications in training AI without exporting manufacturing data. Noting that security concerns make it difficult for manufacturers to pool data in one place, Yoo outlined the principles of federated learning, which keeps original data inside each company and shares only the training results, and proposed ways to apply it across Ulsan's manufacturing supply chain.
Sung Min-seok, chief operating officer of OnePredict, then spoke on trends and applications in time-series data technology (Time-LLM) for the manufacturing industry. Sung traced the technological shift from Time-LLM to time-series foundation models (TSFM) and introduced a strategy for an "AI native factory," in which AI is first applied to small-scale processes before being extended across an entire plant. A question-and-answer session followed, in which participants discussed what to consider when deploying the technology on site.
The Ulsan Information Industry Promotion Agency reorganized the Digital Innovation U Forum in 2024 into six subcommittees with 87 members to identify digital innovation policy tasks for the region's key industries.
"Ulsan's manufacturing sites have accumulated vast amounts of data, but in many cases it could not be put to immediate use in the AI transition because of security issues and insufficient capability," Lee said. "Industry, academia and research institutes need to come up with practical measures to bring technologies that protect companies' core data while creating added value into our key industries."
An official at the Ulsan Information Industry Promotion Agency said, "The success or failure of manufacturing AX depends on using on-site data safely and effectively," adding, "We will provide support so that the technologies discussed at the seminar lead to actual AI adoption at local companies."