For the past several decades, both the computing and communications industries have seen tremendous advances in the technologies and the services based on them. The World Wide Web and the Internet, powered by the broadband fixed/mobile access, have led to the emergence of various new online services, which have drastically changed personal and social lifestyles, thereby inducing the trend of ICT convergence in various industries. Both the hardware and software have been playing an important role in the evolution, but recently more emphasis is shifting towards software technology as hardware performance improves. The importance of software is prominent in strategies of platform players like Google, Apple, and Amazon, where they are continuing to develop new technologies mostly in the fields of Computer Science and Engineering (e.g., virtualization, operating systems, data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, image processing, voice recognition, pattern recognition). It is evident that software is drawing more attention for all aspects of IT, including the telecommunications sector. This talk will cover the current market status of telecommunications industry and the impact of software and system technologies on the latest ICT convergence services that kt has been developing. Then, kt's vision to prepare and proactively respond to the changes in telecommunications industry is outlined. Furthermore, this talk describes the major research initiatives of KT Advanced Institute of Technology and its effort for open collaborations with the global R&D community.

James Won-Ki Hong is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Executive Vice President for KT since March 2012, where he is responsible for leading the R&D effort of KT and its subsidiary companies. He is Chairman of Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) Standardization Board in Korea. His interests include network innovation (such as SDN and NFV), cloud computing, mobile services, IPTV, ICT convergence (such as Smart Home, Smart Grid, e-Health), and next generation technologies such as big data analytics and intelligence. Before taking the role of CTO at KT, he had worked at POSTECH for 17 years as a professor including Head of Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Dean of Graduate School for Information Technology, Director of POSTECH Information Research Labs and Head of the Division of IT Convergence Engineering. He was also co-founder and CTO of Netstech, a Palo Alto, USA-based startup developing network integrated ultra-dense, blade servers from 2000 to 2002. Over the past 20 years, he has been an active volunteer in various committees in IEEE, ComSoc, and KICS. He has served as Steering Committee Chair of IEEE NOMS, IM and APNOMS, as well as Chair of CNOM and KNOM. He has also been serving as EiC of Wiley’s International Journal of Network Management (IJNM) and ComSoc Technology News (CTN) as well as an editorial member of the IEEE TNSM, JNSM and JCN. James received his HBSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1991.