박종우 연구실

What SNU Robotics Institute can Learn from the MIT Media Lab. He also enjoyed SNU’s scenic campus and many aspects of living in Korea. More importantly, he envisioned numerous ways to collaborate with SNU researchers: deploying existing projects, extending them into platforms, and building entire ecosystems around them. Dr. Shtarbanov used the word “impact” far more often than “research.” Impact is hardly an unfamiliar term to researchers at SNU. If anything, it is a word they are required to include in almost every research proposal. Researchers often struggle to imagine and describe “impact” before their work has even begun, as though the research were about to lead immediately to commercialization or a startup. For people accustomed to writing those ambitious projections, his insistence that researchers should think more deeply about impact was, frankly, somewhat puzzling. But the impact he describes is not a grand promise written in advance of the research. Nor is he saying that every paper must immediately lead to technology transfer or a startup. Those outcomes, he explains, happen in stages. To him, impact is closer to the work that begins after the paper is published. Broadly speaking, he says there are at least three factors by which he defines the true impact a technology project. The first is the number of users or beneficiaries served by the project. The second is the number of use cases or utilities the project offers. A technology that serves five different needs, for example, has greater impact potential than a technology that serves only one, all else being equal. The third factor is the number of progenies it enables. If a project engenders new discoveries and new projects, it creates what he calls a “posterity impact.” Its impact includes not only thos