Yong-jeong Oh, a PhD student in the POSTECH Department of Electrical Engineering advised by Professor Yo-Seb Jeon, won a bronze award in the Communication & Networks category at the 32nd Samsung Humantech Paper Awards, organized by Samsung Electronics.

The award-winning paper, “Towards Optimal Semantic Communications: From Enc-Dec Design to Target Channel Characterization,” redefines semantic communication systems as an encoder–target channel–decoder architecture and presents a new design perspective that overcomes the limitations of conventional encoder–decoder-centered design. In particular, it proposes a framework for optimizing the target channel itself to maximize task performance under limited communication resources, demonstrating excellent performance across various semantic communication settings.

Organized by Samsung Electronics and jointly supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT and JoongAng Ilbo, the Samsung Humantech Paper Awards are Korea’s largest academic paper competition. Held annually since 1994, the awards identify and support outstanding talent in science and technology.

February 2026