Un, Chong Kwan (In Memoriam)

Un Chong Kwan, a professor at Korea Advanced Institute Science and Technology (KAIST) whose research helped to pave the way for digital communication and signal processing, died on Feb. 1997 at age 57.
Born on the Jeong-eup of the South Korea, he received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from University of Delaware, United States of America, in 1964 and M.S. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Delaware in 1966 and 1969 respectively.
From 1969 to 1973, he was an assistant professor in university Maine, Portland. He also served as a technical staff and consultant of Socially Responsible Investment International, Menlo Park, California from 1973 to 1977 and 1978 to 1979 respectively. He then came as a professor in electrical engineering at KAIST, Korea, at 1977 and stayed for 20 years. During the service, from 1982 to 1983, he was a dean of engineering college. Moreover, he worked as an adviser at Gold Star Electric Company, Seoul, from 1982 to 1990, and Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejon, from 1987 to 1989.
He awarded Leonard G. Abraham award in 1978 because of his excellent paper on IEEE transaction on communication journal. He also was selected as a fellow member by Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1986, and was chosen as a regular member of Korea Academy of Science and Technology in 1995. He received an order of civil merit (Dongbaeg medal) given by the Republic of Korea.
He has conducted various researches in the fields of digital communication and signal processing such as synchronization of digital communication and digital voice coding methods such as audio signal and coding, ADM, ADPCM, etc. When he worked at KAIST, he developed voice dialing telephones and voice mail systems, and researched digital speech processing and Korean speech recognition technology. In addition, he designed and developed packet switch, which was commercialized by Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics to build the administrative computer network operated by DACOM.
He established the Digicom, the first venture company of Korea in 1986, and developed a convergence product of communication and computers in 1988, which was called an audio tex device that provided all the information of the Olympics with a single phone. Then, game schedule, medal aggregation, cultural event, and sightseeing information were serviced in Korean, English and French in real time. In addition, he commercialized packet system for ISDN and packet terminal, which were used to provide data service by KT.

BY (Dong Ho Cho)