Land Minister: "Building AI Innovation Ecosystem Based on Autonomous Driving Test Cities"

Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kim Yoon-duck held a meeting with domestic experts in autonomous driving artificial intelligence (AI) at the Government Complex Sejong today (July 1) to discuss plans for building an innovation ecosystem for autonomous driving AI.

The meeting was organized to listen to on-site challenges in the research and development process of autonomous driving AI and to discuss ways to build a Korean-style autonomous driving AI ecosystem that connects data acquisition, AI model development, verification, and commercialization, centered around test cities.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is developing Gwangju into an autonomous driving test city to build large-scale, high-quality learning data necessary for autonomous driving AI development. In cooperation with the Ministry of Science and ICT, it is also pushing for the standardization of AI learning data to develop End-to-End (E2E) technology, which allows AI to judge road conditions and move on its own based on learned data.

Minister Kim stated, "Autonomous driving is a representative industry of physical AI, where automobiles and AI are combined," adding, "It depends on how much diverse and extensive learning data is secured and how effectively the AI model learns."

He continued, "Autonomous driving test cities are projects that provide large-scale, high-quality data that is difficult for the private sector to build on its own, as well as AI learning infrastructure and testing environments," and emphasized, "It is important to build a national-level 'data flywheel' ecosystem that connects the secured data to AI model development and improves performance through verification."

Experts suggested that to develop autonomous driving AI capable of operating safely anywhere in the country, data must be continuously secured across various regions and road environments, starting with Gwangju, and an open ecosystem for joint use by industry, academia, and research institutes must be established.

Minister Kim said, "Starting in the second half of this year, 200 autonomous vehicles will be sequentially deployed to the test cities," adding, "We will secure high-quality learning data in more cities and build autonomous driving AI clusters."

(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.